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…
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…
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,…
It’s very easy to sell me on any book that has the premise of older women joining forces to solve crimes, and this series debut lives up to its potential in spades! Which is fitting, since our heroines—long-time nemeses who first appeared in Laurien Berenson’s Melanie Travis mystery series—originally team up because former nun Rose…
This stunningly original novel is being labeled a “literary thriller” but I think that’s doing a disservice to the genre-bending nature of this smart, sensitive tale, that follows four protagonists in desperate search of solutions. Our main character is Jody Morrel, whose younger brother Marty comes home to Pennsylvania after a decade of living in…
Nationally bestselling author and unrepentant foodie Lucy Burdette is the pseudonym of Roberta Isleib, a clinical psychologist who penned the Golf Lover’s and Advice Column Mysteries. Last fall, Burdette published her first standalone suspense novel, the decidedly uncozy Unsafe Haven. This August, she returns with A Dish to Die For—the twelfth Key West Food Critic…
Former CIA librarian-turned-ice cream shop proprietor Riley Rhodes is happy to accept a big catering job as the New England summer draws to a close, padding her coffers for the inevitably leaner winter months ahead. The owner of the nearby Moy Mull Castle, a grand estate patterned on actual Scottish architecture that was later turned…
London 1946. If you haven’t met the partners who comprise the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, you’re in for a treat. They were introduced in Allison Montclair’s The Right Sort of Man. The second book, A Royal Affair, is a particularly apt read during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee year. Miss Iris Sparks (Cambridge grad and serial fiancée)…
When Annie Pederson was nine years old, her little sister Laura was snatched away from her and she herself left for dead in the waters of Lake Superior, near their hometown in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP.) In the twenty-four years since, she’s blamed herself for her sister’s abduction, and chased every lead she could find…
