Todd & Georgine

In this Golden Age mystery series opener set in World War II-era California, a widowed mother literally stumbles into a murder case. Georgine Wyeth is a young widow keeping house for herself and her young daughter, and paying the rent by typing for a local academic, a scientific gentleman. Working late one night (there's a war on, you know), she gets caught in a blackout, only to trip over the dying air-raid warden. A simple snatch-and-grab gone wrong? Or something more sinister? And could Georgine's work for that scientist have put her in jeopardy?

In this Golden Age tale, a writer and his girlfriend take her daughter for a birthday outing that includes a side trip into a murder mystery. In Skeleton Key, readers were introduced to Georgine Wyeth, a widowed young mother in California who stumbled across a body and walked-she emphatically did not fall-into the arms of Todd McKinnon, a pulp novelist living in the community where the murder took place. It's now a few years later, and the couple are taking a car trip with Georgine's daughter, Barbie. On their way home they stop for what they fondly imagine will be a brief visit with a slightly peculiar family, only to be sucked into the family's extremely peculiar mystery, involving a disappeared husband, a dead old lady, and mysterious footsteps in the night ... First published in 1944, Glass Mask is a fascinating mix of old-fashioned puzzle-mystery and a startlingly modern sensibility-that allows Todd and Georgine to travel together, for example, without the benefit of wedding rings. It's a delight.

In this Golden Age mystery by the author of Skeleton Key, murder plunges a Berkeley husband and wife into the secret world of a cult. It's 1949, and with the War well and truly in the past, Americans are relaxing into the warm bath of suburbia. Even groovy Northern California, even sharp-eyed Georgine and Todd McKinnon (last seen in The Glass Mask and Skeleton Key) have largely succumbed to the lure of comfortable conformity. But the McKinnons' pleasant domesticity is shattered by the arrival of a distinctly nonconformist young man, who arrives unannounced one night, tells a wild tale, and dies a short time later. Why did he choose the McKinnons to hear him out? Sure, he hoped Todd would write a check, eager to turn the strange story into one of the thrillers he regularly sells to the pulps. But could there have been another reason? One bizarre phone call, and Georgine is all too ready to believe there might have been ...