Edna Ferber Mystery

With an introduction by Donis Casey. "A tale full of wit, humor, sorrow and, more important, the truth." -TONY HILLERMAN, New York Times bestselling author Alafair Tucker is a strong woman, the core of family life on a farm in Oklahoma where the back-breaking work and daily logistics of caring for her husband Shaw, their nine children, and being neighborly requires hard muscle and a clear head. She's also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley's body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn't surprised that his long-suffering family isn't, if not actually celebrating, much grieving. When Alafair helps Harley's wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley's demise was anything but natural-there is a bullet lodged behind his ear. Alafair is concerned when she hears that Harley's son, John Lee, is the prime suspect in his father's murder, for Alafair's seventeen-year-old daughter Phoebe is in love with the boy. At first, Alafair's only fear is that Phoebe is in for a broken heart, but as she begins to unravel the events that led to Harley's death, she discovers that Phoebe might be more than just John Lee's sweetheart: she may be his accomplice in murder.

Jack Mabie claims to be the meanest man in Alaska, yet the old sourdough seems to be just one of the crusty geezers in every roadhouse bewildered by how his lawless frontier life has morphed into the pastel 1950s world of martini cocktail bars up and down Fairbanks' Second Avenue. Sonia Petrievich, an editor at The Gold, her father Hank's weekly pro-statehood paper, learns through the mukluk telegraph about Jack's gleeful account of murders and robberies and shell games during the gold rush days. Her breezy March 1957 profile lets Jack revel in newfound notoriety. Edna Ferber, not completely satisfied with her forthcoming novel Ice Palace, has just returned for further research and is fascinated by Jack and his wild tales. Plus the previous summer, young Athabascan lawyer Noah West, a war hero and Sonia's lover, bent on bettering the lives of Alaskan Natives, had sharpened Edna's sense of a corner of the territory she'd ignored: "I felt I'd lost sight of the real Alaska, the heartless icebox in the North, the blank-eyed old-timers still haunted by gold... I'd forgotten Alaska is still frontier...a violent, mysterious world below the glossy skin I'd written about." When Jack is found beaten to death, Noah becomes a suspect. Two violent deaths follow. Edna, Noah's advocate, decides she needs to clear his name, believing the murders are connected. As debates over potential statehood rage, Edna begins unearthing scandals and sordid stories hidden in Fairbanks but also dating back to village life in Fort Yukon and down into the Lower 48. What horrible secrets carried from the Arctic Circle have led to so many murders? And what novelist could stand aside from this story?

January 3, 1935. The trial opens in Flemington, New Jersey, for the man accused of "the crime of the century." And Edna Ferber is there to cover it. 1932. On a windy March 1 night, Charles Lindbergh, America's hero, discovers that his twenty-month-old son has been snatched from his crib. A ransom is arranged. Yet two months later, Little Lindy is found in a ditch near his Hopewell home, several weeks dead from a blow to the head. It takes over two years to arrest a suspect. Bruno Richard Hauptmann is caught passing one of the marked ransom bills. Press from across the world swarm to his trial. Bestselling novelist Edna Ferber and raconteur Aleck Woollcott, both hired by the New York Times to cover it, are part of the media frenzy, bickering like the literary lions they are. Did this immigrant carpenter really commit the crime? Alone? Observant sometime-sleuth Edna is not so sure. Local citizens, whipped into a frenzy by the yellow press, march through the streets demanding Hauptmann burn. Walter Winchell takes the lynch mob sentiment national. A British waitress at Edna's hotel, who'd hinted she had priceless information that could blow the trial wide open, is murdered. Edna begins to suspect a miscarriage of justice is underway, fueled in part by anti-German sentiment, in part by class privilege. Edna doesn't find Colonel Lindbergh the golden boy of legend. But there he is, entering the courthouse flanked by a quartet of New Jersey troopers. There's Hauptmann, handsome and calm despite his date with the electric chair-unless Edna can alter the course of justice.

Reality is illusion. Illusion is reality, and nothing is what it seems. This is how Magician Valentine Hill always begins her act. Valentine herself is a case in point: she is unquestionably real, but she has no legal existence. Her mother, a skilled con artist, has never revealed Valentine's real age, birth place, or her father's identity-except to say that he was a magician. No grifter herself, the scrupulous Valentine has spent years searching for her evasive mother, desperate to learn the basic facts of who she is. Literally, to get a life. Robbed of her stake in Vegas, she chases it to San Francisco where a series of odd events reunites her with her mother who, Valentine is sure, despite her respectable façade, is playing one of the city's super rich. And Valentine quickly enters a world where truly nothing is what it seems. A socialite is a ruthless criminal, a car mechanic a psycho killer, and a cab driver a seductive gangster. After a friendly FBI agent is killed, Valentine forces herself into playing a grifter's role to put the criminals-and her mother-away. Or at the very least, get what she wants from mom. Will her skills as a magician prove enough to help her maintain the illusion?

Zookeeper Theodora "Teddy" Bentley takes Alejandro, the Gunn Zoo llama, to a Monterey Bay area Renaissance Faire. Soon after, Teddy stumbles upon the still-warm body of the Reverend Victor Emerson, owner of the local wedding chapel. He is dressed in his royal robes as Henry VIII. At first it appears as if Alejandro stomped the man to death, but a closer look reveals a crossbow dart in the man's back. Teddy's investigation proves the "reverend" is really an escaped convict, and every marriage he's performed in the past twenty years is null and void. He twice married Teddy's ex-beauty queen mother Caro to wealthy men, and when both marriages failed, Caro received large financial settlements. Now she may have to give all that money back. But Caro wasn't the only person with a grievance against Victor. The child of the man Victor once murdered may have wanted to kill him, too. Then Teddy's embezzling father flies in from exile in Costa Rica to help spring Caro from jail, putting his own freedom in jeopardy. Can Teddy solve this case before someone else she knows is implicated?

"Havill is a master at using procedural details to expose the complexities of small-town relationships, but he also excels at drawing meaning from landscape." -Booklist A rattlesnake fang pegged in a teenager's eye is just the beginning of a spring day for Posadas County Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman. The injured lad's older brother goes missing, and is found dead in an arroyo, apparently killed by his cartwheeling ATV. But most puzzling is what the dead boy found moments before he was killed...an astonishing discovery that takes deputies back to a five-year-old killing. Soon Estelle and the now-retired Bill Gastner find themselves looking for a murderer altogether too close to home.

"Ifkovic successfully blends homicide with a loving homage to Budapest on the eve of World War I." -Kirkus Reviews In 1914, as rumors of war float across Europe, Edna Ferber travels to Budapest with Winifred Moss, a famous London suffragette, to visit the homeland of her dead father and to see the sights. Author Edna is fascinated by ancient Emperor Franz Joseph and by the faltering Austro-Hungarian Empire, its pomp and circumstance so removed from the daily life of the people she meets. Sitting daily in the Café Europa at her hotel, she listens to unfettered Hearst reporter Harold Gibbon as he predicts the coming war and the end of feudalistic life in Europe while patrons chatter. Then a shocking murder in a midnight garden changes everything. Headstrong Cassandra Blaine is supposed to marry into the Austrian nobility in one of those arranged matches like Consuela Vanderbilt's still popular with wealthy American parents eager for titles and impoverished European nobility who have them to offer. But Cassandra is murdered, and her former lover, the dashing Hungarian Endre Molnár, is the prime suspect. Taken with the young man and convinced of his innocence, Edna begins investigating with the help of Winifred and two avant-garde Hungarian artists. Meanwhile possible war with Serbia is the topic of the day as Archduke Franz Ferdinand prepares to head to Sarajevo. While the world braces for disaster, Edna uncovers the truth-and it scares her.

The death of an instructor, a mugging, and another "accidental" death has Detective Constable Ellis Pooley sending Robert Amiss undercover to investigate Knightsbridge School of English and capture the killer before anymore "accidents" occur.

"An intriguing crime drama..."-MBR Bookwatch Four years ago Emily Locke's life was shattered when her infant daughter and husband were lost in an inexplicable accident. She has nearly rebuilt her fragile mental health when Richard Cole, a disgraced former police detective now working as a PI, resurfaces. He says he needs help only she can provide-reconnaissance at a Texas skydiving establishment over a thousand miles away. Emily knows better than to work with him again, but she can't refuse when she learns it's a missing child case. At Gulf Coast Skydiving, similarities between this new case and Emily's troubled past make it increasingly difficult for her to stay objective. Soon she's convinced that she is somehow connected to whoever took little Casey Lyons. Someone at the quiet, rural airstrip knows what happened to the boy and to Emily's own daughter. To find Casey before it's too late, Emily will have to make sense of the menacing parallels between this case and her daughter's....

First book in the Alexa Glock Mystery series! For a normal tourist, finding a body in a geothermal pool in New Zealand might ruin a vacation. Forensic specialist Alexa Glock, however, sees a chance to help local law enforcement with a baffling case. But as she finds herself embroiled in the tense investigation, she can't help but wonder: is the past better left undisturbed, or unearthed? These thrilling New Zealand mysteries are: • Perfect for fans of Kathy Reichs and Nevada Barr • For readers of international mysteries and forensic investigation mysteries When a body is found half-submerged in a molten mud pot in one of Rotorua's famous geothermal wonderlands, forensics expert Alexa Glock spots a way to prolong her stay in New Zealand, which she has been visiting for work. Teeth are her expertise, and the investigation needs her help, as other ways of identifying the body may have... melted away. Joining Detective Inspector Bruce Horne and his team, Alexa finds herself sleuthing out more than teeth. She soon discovers that the murder victim, a city councilman, had trespassed on an island sacred to the Maori. The ancient punishment for such a transgression is disaster, demonic possession, or death… and when she visits the island to investigate, the same outcome is promised for her. Alexa is fascinated by New Zealand culture but doesn't quite believe in ancient spirits returning to exact revenge, so when another victim turns up dead, she begins to wonder whether the real threat is something-or someone-much closer to home. A fast-paced forensic mystery set in New Zealand, Molten Mud Murder introduces Alexa Glock, an investigator with a knack for gleaning the truth from bones and teeth. Full of enough forensics and action for fans of Kathy Reichs or the tv series Bones, Sara E. Johnson presents a page-turning story about facing the past and cracking the door open to an unexpected future.