Madoc Rhys

In rural Canada, a woman dies after eating from a jar of tainted green beans-and a Mountie must preserve the evidence. In a quiet small town in New Brunswick, old Agatha Treadway makes one last cranky complaint to her niece before dying on her kitchen floor. The cause seems to be a jar of contaminated string beans, which sat on Agatha's basement shelf for years before becoming her final meal. The town doctor calls it a tragic accident-and a warning to all who can their own vegetables-but Agatha's neighbor, the intrepid Janet Wadman, knows better. Agatha was an expert canner, which means the beans must have been placed there by someone else. This was murder. Before Janet can share her theory with the town doctor, he, too, meets an untimely death. To oversee the investigation, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police send Madoc Rhys, a wholly unusual Mountie who poses as Janet's relative while he searches for the killer. But Madoc soon finds himself falling for his partner in detection, and before he can make his feelings known, the pair will have to contend with a secret far more deadly than botulism.

Though he may not look the part, Madoc Rhys is a Mountie-and his keen sense of detection tells him it's time to ask Janet Wadman to marry him. They have just gotten engaged when Christmas rolls around, and Janet's boss invites them to his family estate for a last holiday fling before Janet leaves her job. After a long helicopter ride, they are at Graylings, ancestral home of the Condryckes, a family so strange that Canada's shortest Mountie fits right in. There is a psychic old woman, an erudite butler, and a family patriarch who is the spitting image of an English country squire. And when the elderly Mrs. Condrycke is found murdered, Janet will be glad she brought Madoc along. Though civilization is far away, when there is a Mountie in the house, justice is close at hand.

A Canadian snowstorm and an overturned truck lead to trouble Janet Rhys is driving through the backwoods of Canada when she sees the truck ahead of her lose control, smash into a snow bank, and flip sideways, completely blocking the road. Springing to action, she darts into a nearby barn, searching for something to use to rescue the person trapped inside. When she hears an explosion, Janet returns to find the truck is nothing but smoking wreckage, and the driver has stolen her car. Janet takes shelter in an abandoned house, and is waiting for help to come when the truck driver's accomplices set fire to her hideout. Just before she is engulfed in flames, she leaps through a window and escapes into the snow. The killers think their witness is dead, and if Janet doesn't move quickly, they will be right.

A Canadian Mountie investigates a murder among musicians in this mystery by the Edgar Award-nominated author of the Peter Shandy series. Although he is a decorated officer of the Mounted Police, Madoc Rhys's tin ear has long been an embarrassment to his musically fixated family. But when his father's orchestra needs a policeman, the Mountie gets a chance to make daddy proud. It began as pranks among the brass instruments, but something is rotten inside the Wagstaffe Symphony, and is about to graduate to something criminal. Called in to look into the tensions within the group, Madoc arrives just in time to see the French horn player keel over. The death appears natural, and the orchestra boards the plane to its next engagement. But when a storm forces them to make an emergency landing and take shelter in an eerie old lodge, the extent of the danger becomes clear. Madoc may never understand music, but he has a good ear for murder, and is about to show off his chops.