Site Redesign - CSS/Wordpress

Hello Freelancers! I'm currently looking for someone to take our current design, and completely redo it. It's currently built in wordpress, and the CMS will stay that way. So the design will need to be created with this in mind. All of the content will stay the same, however it'll be separated differently. Here is the current website: [login to view URL] We would like to maintain a "murder/mystery" vibe, but you must keep in mind that this is a comedy as well. So it shouldn't be too intense of a theme. We really want something a lot cleaner, with much better usability. The new content structure will be: Home / About / News / Events / Books / Blog / Favorites / Contact. We would like for the homepage to have an area where latest news events are also posted as well... and perhaps even some of the events as well, so these posts will need to be categorized from now on, and subsequently posted. The events page currently uses the gigpress plugin... and I may ditch this as well since we don't like the limitations. If anyone has a better idea of what to use here I'm all ears. We will provide a lot of creative liberty here, but we want something clean and themed with the feeling of the book... which is a murder mystery comedy. I would also like to see examples of how you'd design this PRIOR to accepting you for the job. Seeing your portfolios will be nice, but I won't select someone until they've provided a mock idea of the site that I feel will be a good fit. So please, customize your responses to this. Thanks, and good luck!