A Peculiar Combination by Ashley Weaver is the first book in the new Electra McDonnell series, set in England during World War II, and a delightful mystery filled with spies, murder, romance, and the author’s signature wit. Like they always say: desperate times call for desperate measures. Electra McDonnell and her Uncle Mick know it’s…
The Granite Coast Murders combines many felicitous elements, like stunning surroundings, a fish-out-of-water commissaire, and a chère amie determined that Commissaire Dupin fully embrace a fortnight’s vacation at the beach in Brittany. Claire is thwarted by the Trégastel-Plage villagers who are eager to enlist Dupin into solving the myriad mysteries on their doorstep. Dupin seems…
A messenger dressed all in black, his ensemble topped off with a “pillbox-like cap,” delivers a message to Delaney Nichols at the Cracked Spine, the bookstore where she works. Ms. Delaney Nichols, Your presence is requested this afternoon at 2:00 at Deacon Brodie’s Tavern to discuss Ms. Shelagh O’Conner’s vast collection of rare and…
Like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol opening: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that,” the premise of Will Thomas’s thirteenth Barker and Llewelyn tale is also without doubt. Tsesarevich Nicholas (heir to Czar Alexander III) was a dead ringer for his cousin, Prince George of England. Their uncanny resemblance,…
A Lonely Man by Chris Power is an existential mystery that explores the uncertain intersection between fiction and reality and the disastrous consequences of a chance encounter. In a Berlin bookstore, two Englishmen meet while reaching for the same volume of Bolaño. Robert Prowe is an author with an acute case of writer’s block, constantly…
PROLOGUE A black-pajama-clad figure crouched alongside the sandbags piled up to protect the building in Saigon—a building filled with U.S. soldiers. Putting an explosive charge between the sandbags powerful enough to blow up the building and everyone inside. He was a Vietnamese youth, with dark hair and dark eyes, his face covered with sweat. He…
This Gothic gaslight thriller presents a genuinely fresh twist on the subgenre of investigating Jack the Ripper. In Victorian England, Susannah Chapman leaves the Reading home where she was raised by her grandparents, in order to become a nurse at the London, a prestigious training hospital located in Whitechapel, one of the poorest slums of…
Life is coming up roses for Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin… or does that cliché exaggerate? It does ignore his inability to resist stirring up hornets’ nests. Even if he did exhibit restraint, determined gadfly journalist Hero would undoubtedly shove him aside and do the poking herself. Emerging intact from a chaotic past, Sebastian is…
The Ghost and the Haunted Portrait by Cleo Coyle is the seventh book in the Haunted Bookshop Mystery series, where bookshop owner Penelope Thornton-McClure and her gumshoe ghost team up to solve the stunning mystery at the heart of a madwoman’s self-portrait. Penelope Thornton-McClure is thrilled to be picking up a shipment of original cover…
Priced at just $1.99, this original short story in the bestselling Mike Bowditch mystery series by Paul Doiron finds Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch on the hunt for a sinister prowler turning a couple’s dream vacation home into a nightmare. New owners of a dream cottage on a remote Maine lake find themselves taunted, then…
