Mad Dog & Englishman

When a drug bust reveals exotic animals at a marijuana grow site, zookeeper Iris Oakley and a colleague ride to the rescue in the zoo's van. But instead of pets they find smuggled parrots and tortoises destined for sale to unscrupulous or unsuspecting collectors. Iris also discovers a woman who escaped the bust-dead. The murder and the drug ops are the cops' problem, but Iris is determined to break the criminal pipeline that snatches rare animals from the wild and leaves them neglected in old barns. The zoo's facilities are full, and Iris ends up with two macaws shrieking in her basement. Next, brothers from the busted family, both murder suspects, invade her home, demanding information they think their father passed on as he, too, died at the scene. Iris flees with her child, but soon realizes she must be on the offensive. People she counts on are not who they claim to be. Sorting through baffling clues and tripping over secrets old and new, Iris soon learns that everyone has an agenda. And at least one of them is deadly....

Thanks to spinal tumor surgery, Cincinnati Homicide Detective Will Borders now walks with a cane and lives alone with constant discomfort. He's lucky to be alive and lucky to have a job as public information officer for the department. When a star cop is brutally murdered, he's assigned to find her killer. The crime bears a chilling similarity to killings on the peaceful college campus nearby, where his friend, pain nurse Cheryl Beth Wilson, is now teaching nursing. Moreover, the two young victims were her students. Most homicides are routine; the suspects readily apparent. But here, there are no easy suspects, and even Borders' stepson is under suspicion. This unlikely pair again teams up to pursue a sadistic predator before he kills someone else. Catching him will mean uncovering some of the darkest secrets in the Midwestern river metropolis where change is slow, tradition and history weigh as thick as the summer humidity, and danger can hide in the most respected places.

Macavity Award 2018 nominee, Best First Novel Left Award 2018 nominee, Best Debut Mystery Novel "Thomas makes a rollicking debut with this comic mystery featuring an unconventional protagonist who proves to have the skills of MacGyver. With its sexy overtones, this fun, character-driven novel will appeal to Janet Evanovich fans." -Library Journal STARRED review Cyd Redondo, a young, third-generation Brooklyn travel agent who specializes in senior citizens, has never ventured farther than New Jersey. Yet even Jersey proves risky when her Travel Agents' Convention fling, Roger Claymore, leaves her weak in the knees-and everywhere else-then sneaks out of her Atlantic City hotel room at three a.m. Back in Brooklyn, when she reads about smugglers stopped at JFK with skinks in their socks or monkeys down their pants, she never imagines she will join their ranks. But days after the pet store owner next door to Redondo Travel is poisoned, Cyd wins a free safari. Her boss, Uncle Ray, wants to cash it in for computers, but Cyd is determined to go. When Roger turns up at the Redondo clan's door, Cyd invites him along as her "plus one." And just like that she is thrown heels-first into the bizarre and sinister world of international animal smuggling. She and Roger arrive in Africa, luggage lost, to find two of Cyd's elderly clients in a local jail. She manages to barter them out, only to discover smugglers have hidden five hundred thousand dollars' worth of endangered parrots, snakes, frogs, and a lone Madagascan chameleon in the clients' outbound luggage. When Roger steals the bags-is the U.S. Embassy in on the contraband ring?-Cyd and the chameleon helicopter into the jungle to go after Roger on their own. Wondering if "plus one" Roger is actually a minus, Cyd dodges Interpol, faces off with a cobra, steals a diplomatic bag, hijacks a FedEx truck, crashes an eco-safari, winds up in a leopard trap, and is forced to smuggle snakes in her bra. It's a scramble to find the smugglers, save her clients, and solve Mrs. Barsky's murder before finding herself at the top of the endangered species list.

A young woman in Victorian finery is found strangled in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a nineteenth-century time capsule in Boston's Back Bay. Dubbed the "Victorian Girl" by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation-and a darkness reaching back to the Mingoes' roots in England and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife. Boston comic Mark Winslow and the other trustees of Mingo House are divided as to whether the place is sustainable as a museum. Trustee chairman Rudy Schmitz, the brash entrepreneur, seems convinced that the porous roof and escalating rain damage will doom the place. Nadia Gulbenkian, the last of the old guard trustees, is accusing Rudy of engineering the museum's demise. Software executive Jon Kim and a dubious collector of saints' bones and art are pursuing their own clandestine agendas. Mingo House itself seems cursed, for its origins in bullets and cannonballs and the family's reputation as regicides in the execution of King Charles I. A number of people believe its walls conceal treasure, a stolen royal monstrance, and are willing to do anything to retrieve it. In this sequel to The Fisher Boy, pierced college students clash with flawed Brahmin bluebloods, and the Gothic with the high-tech. As the deaths and threats multiply, one question resounds: which will survive this summer of rain, of deluge-Mingo House or its terrified staff?

Sleepy Benteen County, Kansas, turns frantic on election day. Sheriff English, better known as Englishman, faces his toughest re-election challenge yet. The radical religious right is out to unseat him, their candidate an Iraq war hero. But Englishman's only available deputy isn't winning him votes. That very morning, while pursuing a vehicle, the hurried deputy rammed a school bus carrying the Benteen County teen choir. Englishman's brother, Mad Dog, a born-again Cheyenne, rushes back from a quest to the Black Hills. He has had a premonition that the sheriff is in serious danger. Meanwhile, the sheriff's daughters, attending separate colleges, wake with similar fears, cut classes, and hurry home to keep their father safe. The sheriff believes the girls are the ones in need of protection as election day grows ever wilder. A student smuggles a gun into the school and begins shooting and taking hostages. A private army has seized a nearby farm and holds citizens, including Mad Dog, against their will. And, when he finds some spare time, Englishman needs to clear up one little thing about his deputy's accident: Benteen County doesn't have a teen choir. All this by sundown. It's enough to make a sheriff wonder why he wants to serve another term.

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder 'The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.... Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.' -Sherlock Holmes Many of the greatest British crime writers have explored the possibilities of crime in the countryside in lively and ingenious short stories. Serpents in Eden celebrates the rural British mystery by bringing together an eclectic mix of crime stories written over half a century. From a tale of poison-pen letters tearing apart a village community to a macabre mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle, the stories collected here reveal the dark truths hidden in an assortment of rural paradises. Among the writers included here are such major figures as G. K. Chesterton and Margery Allingham, along with a host of lesser-known discoveries whose best stories are among the unsung riches of the golden age of British crime fiction between the two world wars.