Sarah Deane

Sarah Deane may be a newly minted college professor, but whether she's on the rocky coast of Maine or an elegant English estate, her real calling is as "the Nancy Drew of the 1980s" (Publishers Weekly).Everybody loves Dolly! At least, that's what Sarah Deane's sister says. But Sarah's siblings aren't so sure, and when Dolly turns up drowned, they ask Sarah to start asking questions. After all, in the finest cozy-mystery tradition, the police may not be up to the task. And while Sarah may be more PhD than PD, she has a well-known knack for nosing around and uncovering secrets like the ones that may have killed Dolly. Not long thereafter, Sarah is bamboozled into shepherding tiresome Aunt Julia around the great gardens of Europe. It helps that her old friend Ellen Trevino is the expert leading the tour, but when Ellen misses the plane, Sarah's oh-so-sensitive nose starts twitching. When you've solved as many murders as she has, you get a sense about these things, and before the group sits down to its first cream tea, Sarah's nose is jumping like it has springs attached.

Grad student Sarah Deane was on a birdwatching vacation in Texas when she discovered her true calling as the "Nancy Drew of the 1980s" (Publishers Weekly). In these two adventures, however, she's brought her eagle eye back home to Maine. The first stop is Bowmouth College, where Sarah, a newly minted teaching fellow, learns that some things may be even deadlier than academic infighting. One reviewer noted that he was "actually tempted to assign the book to grad students, so they'll know what they're getting themselves into." Sarah's next port of call is in fact the water, as she and her boyfriend kick back on a swanky yacht in exchange for helping the oddball owner distribute Bibles to churches along the rocky coast. It's all smooth sailing until another passenger turns up dead, and Sarah realizes (with some terror and just a little sleuthly delight) that a death on a ship at sea is just a water-logged version of a locked-room mystery.

Sarah Deane has her traveling shoes on again and we all know a sleuth never gets a peaceful vacation. It's holidays at a swanky Arizona resort for English professor Sarah Deane, her fiance, and her feisty Aunt Julia, but somebody's notion of Yuletide appears to include increasingly unpleasant pranks...which turn from nasty to deadly on Christmas morning. In a tip of the hat to Golden Age mysteries, the police are clueless, but Sarah is unhappily certain the killer-the Dude?-is one of the hotel's guests, someone with whom she'd been singing carols only hours earlier. In The Bridled Groom, Sarah and Alex are once again vacationing with Aunt Julia, this time in horse country, where the two young'uns are planning their wedding. Aunt J would love to join in but keeps getting distracted by weird threats delivered with the morning paper-and by the possibility that those threats are connected to a series of sinister accidents. Will this ugliness derail the nuptials, or does Sarah have the horse sense required to catch the culprit? You know the answer, but it's heaps of fun getting there.