The latest terrific installment of the Haunted Bookshop mystery series finds our heroine Penelope Thornton-McClure ready to be the bearer of good news. Ever since her latest part-time employee, Norma Stanton, started working at her bookstore, sales have gone up. Penny and her co-owner, her Aunt Sadie, had been considering closing on Sundays in order…
Not every story that opens with a sense of “Once upon a time” has a happy ending. Many Grimm fairy tales are indeed grim and make readers uncomfortable, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Jackal is set in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming steel town in the 1800s. Seventy miles to the east of Pittsburgh,…
If you love word puzzles, then you are in for such a treat with Alexandra Benedict’s latest novel! On top of being a wonderfully constructed classic manor house mystery, The Christmas Murder Game is filled with challenges for the discerning reader, imbuing the book with loads of extra puzzling fun. I freely admit to spending…
When Isla Larsen Sanchez was eight years old, her mother Elena sent her to Puerto Rico by herself for the first time, flying from New Jersey in the care of a flight attendant, as was usual for the 1970s. Ordinarily, Isla would spend summers in the town where her mother grew up, with both her…
PROLOGUE The day of the murder (Sunday, December 16) Six thirty in the morning. The Hôtel de Verbier was dark. Outside, it was pitch black and snowing heavily. On the sixth floor, the doors of the service elevator opened. A hotel employee appeared with a breakfast tray and made his way toward Room 622. When…
After the death of her long-term partner, Penny is all alone in the world. She continues living in the apartment they once shared, her world shrinking smaller and smaller with the perhaps inevitable loss of her mobility as she ages. When she has a fall one day, her landlord Mike sets into motion a plan…
I confess: I’m a bit biased when it comes to Marcia Clark. While much of the world—or at least much of the non-reading world—continues to base their opinions of her on what they saw or heard during “The Trial of the Century,” those of us who’ve discovered her crime fiction (also) recognize her as a…
Young Willa Noble is thrilled to be able to leave her position at the beck and call of an overbearing boarding house mistress to go into service in the home of one of Amherst, Massachusetts’ most prominent families instead. Her new superior, Margaret O’Brien, is demanding but fair, and the pay is much better. The…
Chapter 1 I met Brendan Kaiser, the owner of my TV station Channel 10 and about a zillion other properties, for lunch on a sunny spring day at a restaurant called Tri-Bar in lower Manhattan. Tri-Bar is what’s known in New York as a celebrity restaurant. In other words, whenever you read the gossip columns,…
April Claus is very excited to be able to bring her best friend from Oregon, Claire Emerson, up to Santaland to see what her new hometown has to offer in the lead up to Christmas, their most important holiday. Claire originally figured that April had just relocated to a town that really, really cares about…
