Poisoned Pen Press
Bet your bones, but never bet your heart.
A wedding on the edge of a Hawaiian volcano sounds risky to Dinah Pelerin, the bride's best friend and maid of honor. The bride, Claude Ann Kemper, has bet her heart that she's found the right man at last. The groom has gone all in on a real estate deal that he believes will set him and his new wife up for life. But Hawaii is a tinderbox of ancient myths and modern conflicts over who should control
...The summer of 1919 is now over, and on the high prairie, a small army of men, women, and machines moves across the land, harvesting the wheat. Custom threshers, steam engineers, bindle stiffs, cooks, camp followers, and hobos join the tide. Prosperous farmers proudly proclaim "Rain follows the plow," meaning that the bounty of the land will never be exhausted. Wheat is king as people gleefully embrace the gospels of bounty and progress.
But with
...Former chief warrant officer and amputee Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective agency. They have high hopes that the thriving mountain region will provide a steady stream of cases.
Their first client, a quirky elderly woman in a retirement community, makes a strange request. She wants Sam to right a wrong she committed over seventy years ago. Her victim: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her crime: stealing a manuscript
...64) Roux Morgue
San Francisco pastry chef Mary Ryan is back teaching at her old alma mater, trying to straddle the worlds of both her original mentors and her contemporaries. To make matters worse, Homicide Detective O'Connor has enrolled as a student, claiming to be on disability from the San Francisco Police Department. In the middle of this turf war, Mary is confronted by the dean Robert Benson, who tells Mary she must either force Coolie Martin to leave the
...Murder in the 11th House is the first novel in the mystery series that introduces a unique character in the annals of detective fiction.
Astrological detective David Lowell gets involved in a new case thanks to his daughter, a young defense attorney who believes that a murder suspect is innocent.
A judge has been murdered in a New York City parking garage, and Joanna "Johnny" Colbert, a tough and mouthy bartender, is accused of the crime.
...Jackson doesn't admit he's from Detroit, much less that he used to run a bookie operation there. His bail-bond business in St. Paul was much safer. And if Charlie Victor wasn't his best client, he was at least a steady one, paying his bonding fee out of a secret stash he called his frag box.
Then Charlie is beaten to death on a public street in broad daylight. Just as bizarre and unexpected is the fact that he has named Jackson as his sole
...Someone is bumping off rock's wrinkled royalty. After the death of the third aging rock star—fifty-eight-year-old Freddie Finger, lead singer for multiplatinum band Rocket Fire—astrologer-detective David Lowell is brought into the case.
Freddie wasn't well liked, and Lowell has his hands full with plenty of suspects: There are Freddie's ex-wives, who seem willing enough to kill each other; his disgruntled band members, angry because
...68) Fiddle Game
Herman Jackson has chosen St. Paul as his place of permanent exile from Detroit, where his former life as a bookie got too hot to hold. Now he leads a respectable life as a bail bondsman, while looking over his shoulder.
When a young woman leaves him an antique violin as security for her brother’s bail bond, it’s really the beginning of an elaborate con game. The game is barely underway when the young woman is murdered and, for reasons that
...Time is not on Faye Longchamp's side. She and her husband Joe are working near the mouth of the Mississippi, researching archaeological sites soon to be swamped by oil. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has morphed her run-of-the-mill contract job into a task that might swamp her fledgling company. It isn't helping that an injured babysitter has left Faye to work with a toddler underfoot.
An adolescent girl is drawn to Faye, perhaps because she
...It was only a simple, routine assignment for private investigator Sam Blackman and his partner, Nakayla Robertson: follow a history professor, who is suing a spinal surgeon for malpractice, and catch her in physical activities that undercut her claim.
When the professor, Janice Wainwright, visits Connemara, the home of the poet Carl Sandburg, in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and climbs the arduous trail to the top of Glassy Mountain, Sam believes
...They're an unlikely couple: Lucky Smith, passionate environmentalist and old-time hippie, and Paul Keller, chief constable of Trafalgar, British Columbia. Their weekend getaway to a Scottish-inspired castle in the Rocky Mountains is a chance to explore their fledgling late-in-life relationship and indulge themselves at the famous Banff Springs Hotel.
Trouble interferes when Lucky, strong willed and sometimes too stubborn for her own good,
...It's 1976. Despite fierce international controversy over whether in vitro fertilization (IVF) should ever be performed in humans, doctors around the world race to be first to produce a baby through this procedure.
Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in the Pacific Northwest city of Emerald, has a plan. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist-embryologist at the university who's frustrated by the
...