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1995 - “Write what you know,” Mark Twain advised. I’d been married three times. I wrote romances. 2012 - “Write what you know.” I’d been divorced three times and fantasized about murdering my ex. Only massive doses of chocolate kept my finger off the trigger. Hence…Death by Chocolate.
Murder Under a Blue Moon is totally fun! Well, except for the murders. But Mona Moon is so delightful, she even makes them fun!
The year is 1933, and Mona is a cartographer who has traveled extensively charting areas for archaeologists. The many twists and turns in this story will keep you turning the pages until the end, and then you’ll want to grab the second in the series immediately!
FIVE STARS! "A most delightful novel." -- Readers' Favorite.
Mona Moon is not your typical young lady. She is a cartographer by trade, explorer by nature, and adventurer by heart. But there’s a problem. Miss Mona is broke. It’s during the Depression, and National Geographic has just turned down her application to join an expedition to the Amazon.What’s she to do? Perhaps get a job as a department store salesgirl. Anything to tide her over until a next assignment.
There’s a knock on the door. Who could this be in the middle of the night? Holding a revolver, Mona reluctantly…
1995 - “Write what you know,” Mark Twain advised. I’d been married three times. I wrote romances. 2012 - “Write what you know.” I’d been divorced three times and fantasized about murdering my ex. Only massive doses of chocolate kept my finger off the trigger. Hence…Death by Chocolate.
I laughed out loud throughout most of Small Town Taxi! Yes, even the murders!
The characters are unique and different but real…and I loved all of them except, of course, the bad guys. Even they were fascinating! Honey Walker drives a taxi in a small town…and things happen to Honey.
Another book with a killer first paragraph: “When she shot my front seat, I thought about getting a different job, but it was the passenger side and empty, so I didn’t update my resume.”
Meet Honey Walker, taxi driver extraordinaire. Honey has a few goals in life. Her first is to hustle enough fares and tips to pay the rent and buy those red sequined spike heeled slut shoes she lusts after. Her next goal is to kick her budding relationship with police Lieutenant Jon Stevens into high gear.Honey's problem is that dead bodies and live thugs keep getting in the way of her goals. While she admires the Lieutenant's well formed rear end, the Lieutenant is busy chasing the bad guys who are busy chasing Honey.When Honey's new best friend Belle, former prostitute…
I am the author of the cozy mystery series Samantha Davies Mysteries. Before beginning to write my series, I read hundreds of cozies and loved each one, especially those featuring a small-town setting, an amateur sleuth, and a dog. Since I live in a small upstate New York town, am married to a retired state trooper, and am the mom to a lovable dachshund, what better than to feature all this in a cozy mystery series. So, the Samantha Davies Mystery series was born.
Dying for a Date by Cindy Sample, five-time LEFTY Award Finalist for Best Humorous Mystery
Unsure if she is looking for Mr. Right, or Mr. Every Other Saturday Night, divorced mother of two, Laurel McKay reluctantly joins THE LOVE CLUB, a popular local dating service. Dressed to kill, she meets bachelor number one at a trendy restaurant. But the date is a bust, literally, when the guy decides Laurel is dessert, and she breaks his nose with her cell phone. It gets even worse when the man is found murdered the next morning, and Laurel has his blood on her…
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
The police determine it is murder and set their sights on a gentle former student, Kai. It doesn’t take much urging from Kai’s auntie for Cleo to investigate. But Ben grows distant, and Cleo’s dog grows ill. A couple of accidental deaths later, and someone makes an attempt on her life.
What happened to Cleo’s life in paradise? Can she discover the true killer? Can she stop the killer before the killer stops her?
Paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay. Cleo Cooper is shaken when she finds her favorite student is on the hook for the murder. Danger lurks on land and sea as Cleo and her friends are enticed to search for the true killer. In between paddling, swimming, and arguing with her boyfriend, Cleo discovers all is not what it seems on the Big Island of Hawaii. But will she figure out the truth before she becomes the next victim?
1995 - “Write what you know,” Mark Twain advised. I’d been married three times. I wrote romances. 2012 - “Write what you know.” I’d been divorced three times and fantasized about murdering my ex. Only massive doses of chocolate kept my finger off the trigger. Hence…Death by Chocolate.
Death by a HoneyBee is humorous and suspenseful, and I love the heroine.
Josiah Reynolds is a snarky, fifty-year-old beekeeper in the southern town of Lexington, Kentucky. The story is intriguing and the quirky characters fascinating. The author inserts interesting details of beekeeping without interrupting the story. I later learned that the author is a beekeeper and hence was able to provide authentic details.
When Josiah finds her rival beekeeper dead with his head in one of her bee hives, she is thrown into a world of suspense and mystery…and humor! Josiah is a strong southern woman who greets problems with southern wit and wisdom!
Of course, every mystery needs a perfect crime, but what about the perfect setting? I’m fascinated by how authors manipulate time and place to add to the heightened emotions of their murders, thefts, blackmail, and frauds. It’s the juxtaposition of truth and fantasy—what we believe times were like and how they actually were—that makes setting such an essential detail of every whodunnit. Doing research on my own novel, I wrenched apart the facts and fictions of Post-War America, and grew even more ravenous for mysteries that leveraged their settings for the utmost entertainment.
Try as I might, I can’t get into Marple. But T.E. Kinsey’s Lady Hardcastle series, beginning with the debut A Quiet Life in The Country turns the cozy genre on its head. In this case, the dithering, older busybody is Lady Emily Hardcastle, with her trusty ladies’ maid, Florence Armstrong. As the book and series progress, we find that neither woman is quite the helpless Edwardian female the neighbors believe. Come for the murder mystery and stay for the… knife throwing?
Lady Emily Hardcastle is an eccentric widow with a secret past. Florence Armstrong, her maid and confidante, is an expert in martial arts. The year is 1908 and they've just moved from London to the country, hoping for a quiet life.
But it is not long before Lady Hardcastle is forced out of her self-imposed retirement. There's a dead body in the woods, and the police are on the wrong scent. Lady Hardcastle makes some enquiries of her own, and it seems she knows a surprising amount about crime investigation...
As Lady Hardcastle and Flo delve deeper into rural rivalries…
When I make a snarky remark during a party, chances are one person will catch my eye with the amused look that says, “I saw what you did there.” Everyone else will keep right on talking. But in a book, the reader is right there in the character’s head, which lets your audience catch those subtle humorous comments. In my mystery series, The Accidental Detective, Kate shares witty observations about life with the reader – making Kate funnier than I am. I don’t do as much slapstick and joking (in life or in fiction), but I enjoy writers who pull off those forms of humor well. Humor makes life’s challenges bearable
In this historical mystery set in the 1920s, the hero-narrator is likable and a bit goofy. He reminded me of Bertie Wooster in the Jeeves stories by PG Wodehouse, but Heathcliff is more intelligent. The mystery was complicated and puzzling, with added fun from the 1920s setting. It’s hard to investigate when phone lines are down and roads become impassable in poor weather. I've read the rest of the series, and they’re all pretty strong. Some move the action to Scotland or Egypt for extra 1920s travel excitement. They’re perfect reads when you want a light cozy with historical charm and some chuckles along the way.
It's 1920 and Christmas is coming. Major Lennox finds a body on his doorstep - why on his doorstep? Was it to do with the Countess? Was it about the ruby necklace? Lennox goes to Melrose Court home to his uncle, Lord Melrose, to uncover the mystery. But then the murders begin and it snows and it all becomes very complicated....
Major Heathcliff Lennox, ex-WW1 war pilot, six feet 3 inches, tousled, dark blond hair, age around 30 - named after the hero of Wuthering Heights by his romantically minded mother - much…
I have always been a voracious reader of murder mysteries and thrillers. My business career took me to all but one continent and countless countries, mostly living and working in large metropolitan areas. After retiring, I moved to a small Midwest city and found it an excellent setting for a murder mystery when I sat down to write. Since I started, I've written two books in the Detective Sasha Frank Mystery Series, and I'm currently writing the third. The first book, Deliberate Duplicity, won a 2021 American Fiction Award. The second book in the series is Cold Consequences. I've been pleased with the reviews on Goodreads and other platforms.
Patricia Hunt Holmes is a fellow writer and friend who has written two books. Her second novel is titled, Crude Ambitions, and Pat weaves a great story of the good and evil in the ever-booming Texas oil industry. After leaving the Texas Hill Country to fulfill her dreams of becoming a lawyer, the main character in the book, Carolyn Page, faces numerous crises of consciousness in her personal life and professional career. Nevertheless, Carolyn excels and works tirelessly to become a partner in a prestigious Houston law firm that exposes her to many challenging and life-changing decisions for herself and others. Pat has developed a rich cast of characters to deliver a riveting story that is sure to please.
2022 IPPY Book Awards Bronze Medalist in Suspense & Thriller
A Texas Reckoning
In the early morning hours after a law firm recruiting party at a beachside house on Galveston Island, a female summer intern is found lying on the floor, bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. Something terrible has happened. She is taken to a hospital by the only other woman there, but the next day the intern is gone without a trace. Those involved decide to keep silent about the incident in order to further their own career ambitions, but the two women are haunted by what happened. Time passes.…
When my late wife Margo Wilson suggested, over 40 years ago, that we should study homicides for what they might reveal about human motives and emotions, her idea seemed zany. But when we plunged into police investigative files and homicide databases, we quickly realized that we had struck gold, and homicide research became our passion. Our innovation was to approach the topic like epidemiologists, asking who is likely to kill whom and identifying the risk factors that are peculiar to particular victim-killer relationships. What do people reallycare about? Surveys and interviews elicit cheap talk; killing someone is drastic action.
It was Calvin Trillin's hilariously enthusiastic stories about the world's best restaurants (most of which seem to be situated in his hometown of Kansas City) that initially made me one of his many fans. Between 1967 and 1982, however, he also wrote a series of long articles for TheNew Yorkerentitled "U.S. Journal," in which he used singular events, often homicides, as the launchpads for tales rich in local history and lifeways. Sixteen of Trillin's best are assembled here. Has anyone written more penetratingly about how rivalries and resentments are embedded in social settings?
True stories of sudden death in the classic collection by a master of American journalism
“Reporters love murders,” Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. “In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden.” Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people’s lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end. As Trillin says, Killings…
As a former Division 1 basketball player at Marquette University and current ecommerce executive, I’m always looking for new sources of inspiration. Please enjoy my list and send me any comments on what you find inspiring!
Win By Two is the true story about a Kansas City drug dealer and a private school teacher, bonded together through basketball. This is a powerful story about race, leadership, and what can happen when people get outside of their comfort zones and build bridges in their community. It also challenges our internal biases that we may not even know exist.
A drug dealer, who grew up in the urban core of Kansas City. A private school teacher who grew up in San Diego and dared to hire a convicted felon as his assistant coach. And the game that saved both their lives. A drama so powerful no storyteller would script the details that unfold. It all starts in a crack house on the west side of the Paseo, and in a broken low income home in east San Diego. It unfolds in a private school gymnasium, a state penitentiary, a chapel in downtown Kansas City, the Johnson County Suburbs, and…
Having grown up in segregated Knoxville, TN, I've often wondered what having a black friend as a child would have been like. My MFA thesis, in the 1980s, was a novella about just such a friendship. A small group of my (white) MFA classmates insisted that I could not, should not write about black characters. Although I believed them to be mistaken, I put my thesis away and haven’t looked at it since. About ten years ago, I decided to try again. I took an early draft of a new novel to a workshop with John Dufresne, who encouraged me to continue. The result was Beginning with Cannonballs, which received positive reviews and won the 2021 IPPY Silver Medal for Multicultural Fiction.
I’d never read a novel like this. The chapters are similar to diary entries, telling the fictional story of a middle-aged white woman who moves into her childhood home. Over the years, due to “city planning,” East of Troost (an actual neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri) has become nearly all-black. Readers will wonder: Why the heck did the narrator decide to move back there? How will she be treated? Will she have any friends? You’ll enjoy finding out.
Under the guise of a starting-over story, this novel deals with subtle racism today, overt racism in the past, and soul-searching about what to do about it in everyday living.
East of Troost's fictional narrator has moved back to her childhood home in a neighborhood that is now mostly Black and vastly changed by an expressway that displaced hundreds of families. It is the area located east of Troost Avenue, an invisible barrier created in the early 1900s to keep the west side of Kansas City white, "safely" cordoned off from the Black families on the east side.
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