I am a New Mexican mystery writer who can’t get enough of a humorous whodunit. Of course, it can’t be just any mystery. It has to be smart, make me second guess myself, and make me laugh. I’ve seen every episode of Murder She Wrote, Psych, and Monk, to name just a few. I love reading authors like Agatha Christie and Richard Osman. Originally, I began as a romance author and my husband didn’t understand it, considering I didn’t even like reading or watching romances. I’m finally where I belong.
Psychologist Maddie Swallows’ decision to return to New Mexico seemed like a good idea, considering the divorce and her two teenagers she’d dragged along for the ride. But that was before the New Year’s Eve party she was guilt-tripped into attending. Before a member of the town council wound up dead and everyone at the party became a suspect. And before she was forced to unravel the secrets of her former hometown in order to clear her name. Of course, with the help of two precocious teenagers and one meddling mother, the real murderer doesn’t stand a chance.
Dead Before Dinner is the first book of the Maddie Swallows series. If you love small towns, quirky characters, and an intriguing whodunit, you’ll love this cozy mystery.
I can’t say enough good things about The Thursday Murder Club.
It took an unlikely group of elderly amateur sleuths and made them the stars of the show, I was laughing well into the night, as this group of retirees can get away with just about anything, and the mystery kept me guessing right until the end. I will keep coming back to this series again and again and I know I will never get bored.
A New York Times bestseller | Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment
"Witty, endearing and greatly entertaining." -Wall Street Journal
"Don't trust anyone, including the four septuagenarian sleuths in Osman's own laugh-out-loud whodunit." -Parade
Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves A female cop with her first big case A brutal murder Welcome to... THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
I’m a sucker for mysteries that feature unlikely sleuths, and young Flavia de Luce is just that sleuth.
Because she’s a child, people underestimate her, but she has the curiosity, intelligence, and innocent humor that makes her the perfect investigator. More than once I laughed at her antics and marveled at how someone so young could make the deductions she did.
Meet Flavia: Mystery Solver. Master Poisoner. 11 Years Old.
England 1950. At Buckshaw, the crumbling country seat of the de Luce family, very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia is plotting revenge on her older sisters.
Then a dead bird is left on the doorstep, which has an extraordinary effect on Flavia's eccentric father, and a body is found in the garden. As the police descend on Buckshaw, Flavia decides to do some investigating of her own.
Praise for the historical Flavia de Luce mysteries: 'The Flavia de Luce novels are now a cult favourite' Mail on Sunday
With a lively group of headstrong southern women as the support for the amateur sleuth, Mae West, Tonya Kappes kept me laughing throughout the first book of the Camper and Criminals mystery series.
There are certainly parts where she tugged on my heartstrings, but Kappes didn’t allow me to stay sad for too long, instead focusing on the beauty of this rundown camping ground, and the people in it.
If you would've told me year ago that I was going to be broke and penniless after my husband took everyone to the cleaners after he pulled off one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, leaving me a run down campground, a set of camper keys, before he escaped prison and when the FBI came to the campground to see if I helped him escape, then the no good you know what floated up to the top of the lake in that campground making me the number one suspect, I'd said you were…
I’ve never been to Louisiana, but this mystery made me feel I’d been transported to the bayou.
I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t survive in Sinful, Louisiana, and CIA assassin, Fortune Redding, felt the same way. I couldn’t stop laughing as she stumbled her way through the book, attempting to remain undercover, even as a dead man’s bones washed up in her backyard.
And of course this story wouldn’t be the same without the elderly sidekicks, Ida Belle and Gertie, pushing their way into her life, and into her heart.
CIA assassin Fortune Redding is about to undertake her most difficult mission ever-in Sinful, Louisiana. With a leak at the CIA and a price placed on her head by one of the world's largest arms dealers, Fortune has to go off-grid, but she never expected to be this far out of her element. Posing as a former beauty queen turned librarian in a small bayou town seems worse than death to Fortune, but she's determined to fly below the radar until her boss finds the leak and puts the arms dealer out…
Animal lovers everywhere will love this humorous mystery series, where Ivy Galloway leaves the big city and her stressful job to open her own farm-themed inn, alongside her rescue dog.
Of course, not knowing a thing about running a farm and then having a murder occur on her property right after moving in was likely more stressful than anything she’d experienced at her previous job. Dogcatcher in the Rye kept my attention and had me laughing the whole time.
As soon as I finished this book, I started reading the next in the series.
Turning a hobby farm into a quaint country inn is a piece of cake compared to solving a murder.
Ivy Galloway may not know an alpaca from a llama, but nothing’s going to stop her from pursuing her dream of opening a farm-themed inn in her hometown of Clover Grove. Not after what she went through to rescue Keats, her brilliant border collie, and flee the big city.
When Keats finds a body pushing up daisies in her rye field, however, the murder puts a blight on Ivy’s plans to welcome her first official guests in just three weeks. The…
A young adult and epic fantasy novel that begins an entire series, as yet unfinished, about a young girl named Melody who discovers that the pier she lives near goes on forever—a pier that was destroyed by a hurricane that appeared out of blue skies in mere moments in 1983.
Melody doesn't know it, but a king has been searching for her for more than twenty years—longer than she's been alive. His kingdom is readying for the day when they may return to the world found beyond the end of that very pier, a world cast into darkness by an…
Melody and the Pier to Forever: Parts Five and Six
Melody Singleton is a bright 13-year-old girl who loves math, classical music, her mom, her best friend Yaeko, and her dog. To her classmates that makes her a nerd, and they cruelly treat her as such. After being expelled from the advanced algebra class for not paying attention, she meets her new teacher, Mr. Conor, who gives her a very strange homework assignment. You see, she got kicked out because she was distracted by a symbol that the rest of us can't see, a beautiful sigil that, incredibly, Mr. Conor can see too, because it's on the assignment he gave…
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