Judith Hayes

In this series opener by the author of The Appraisal, a Toronto journalist and amateur sleuth tackles a case involving murder and a missing manuscript. So here's the question: You're about to kill yourself. How vital is it that you get your teeth cleaned? That's the question that keeps bugging Judith Hayes, though admittedly, she keeps returning to it: It's so much easier to deal with than the real question of why her friend George Harris would have killed himself at all. But the cops don't care about the questions. Harris's company was drowning in debt, they point out. And several people saw him jump, right in front of the moving train. It was suicide, they insist, awfully sad, onto the next. There's a devious plot here, and a delicious swirl of romance, but the real joy is Judith-feisty, funny, tough as a bulldog, and everything you want in a mystery-novel heroine.

From the author of Hidden Agenda, a reporter and amateur sleuth gets wrapped up in a murder case involving a wealthy recluse and international espionage. Toronto's a big city, and corpses are always turning up, but rarely are they so very well-dressed. Judith Hayes is a well-respected journalist, and interviews are always turning up, but rarely with super-reclusive billionaires. Finally, the world of mystery fiction is rooted in unlikely connections, the hidden strands that tie un-guessed-at motivations to unexpected acts, but rarely do those strands create such a tangled web as in Mortal Sins, leading Judith and her cop-boyfriend from New York to Bermuda to Paris and at last to Hungary, where the billionaire's wartime childhood proves to have been the breeding ground for secrets that have stretched terrible tendrils to the edge of the twenty-first century. A deviously plotted thriller with a spy-story kicker and a froth of romance to help the espionage slide down.