New Releases For The Week Of November 8th, 2020–Part 4

In the Italian-American community of Acorn Hollow, it’s Carnevale. The townspeople are reveling in masked balls and lively processions—and overindulging in meaty lasagnas and rich desserts like sanguinaccio and bomboloni.

For once, though, the town’s most ardent Italophile, matriarch-turned-reporter Rita Calabrese, is not in the holiday spirit. With no crime to solve, nothing to write about, and the clock ticking down towards her hasty and ill-advised Lenten resolution to stop interfering in (or, as she would say, “improving”) the lives of others, she’s staring down forty days of sheer boredom.

But that’s before her twin sister is blackmailed for a scandalous indiscretion and the world’s most uncouth, boorish houseguest shows up and refuses to leave until Rita gives him a crash course in feminism and romance, all to woo back his estranged wife.

Rita tries to adhere to her Lenten resolution, but fate has other plans. When a friend’s wine is poisoned at a masquerade ball and a local vintner’s glamorous fiancée is murdered, Rita bows to the inevitable and dives into an investigation rife with suspects and riven by romantic entanglements and family drama.

Featuring mouth-watering recipes for Italian classics, including lasagna and Italian Easter Pie! (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

Friends, the gift that keeps on giving…

For years, Lynn Hodge and her husband, Chad, visited their favorite restaurant on Thanksgiving. With no family of their own, they sat at the community table, meeting more new friends as each year passed.

When the restaurant closed, Lynn and Chad decided to carry on the tradition and host the holiday in their home. People from all walks of life come together to celebrate Friendsgiving.

This year, the house is fuller than Lynn’s homemade cornucopia, and everyone is looking forward to expanding the guest list. That is until cliques begin to form, and an uninvited family shows up. 

When a mystery bigger than all of them arises, the friends must put their dinner on hold to untangle the truth before the tradition is ruined forever.

Fowl Play is a standalone story featuring some of your favorite misfit characters from each of my series, who, over the years, needed a home on Thanksgiving. While they may have a home with their new friends in their own series, they love to go back and celebrate with old friends and find new mysteries that remind you why some dishes are best served cold. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

Dreams have haunted Grace Ward’s nights for many years. The latest one is the worst. For once, couldn’t her dreams just reveal something wonderful?. Why does murder always get the final word? (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

After teaming up with her boyfriend Camden Turner to open a coffee shop with an amazing bakery, Joanna Coffee gets a job catering an engagement party at the local bed and breakfast that will surely be a big success—until there are several fatalities.

An entire table of guests is poisoned, and the victims all have one thing in common. They drank the frappes served by Cup of Jo. Once again a suspect in a murder investigation, Jo has to find the real killer before her ex and current police detective, Quentin Perry, charges her for the crime.

Fans of Joanne Fluke will enjoy this culinary cozy mystery series.

Scroll up and one-click to start reading today! (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

After an unexpected call from Queen’s Medical Center, Fraya learns her ex-husband, Jackson, has been hospitalized in paradise. Confused that she’s listed as his emergency contact, she puts the pedal to the metal and flies down the highway, only to find he’d checked out the hospital under mysterious circumstances.

Having no other option, she tries concentrating on her day-to-day routine, hanging out with her writing group and the guy she’s sorta seeing. When her life is threatened during date night, Fraya is left with more questions than answers.

Why is Jackson really on the island? And did he bring the danger with him or has some unknown person been plotting against her?

Bailed Out is a cozy mystery about friendship, love, and danger set in the tropics. Order your copy today! (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

Someone has murdered the train station architect, just before opening day!
Henrietta’s aunt’s best friend, Gabriela is the prime suspect.

Balancing a semi-friendly relationship with the local sheriff and perhaps a secret tie to the powerful librarian, Henrietta walks a tightrope in her impromptu investigation. Is one of the town’s old biddies the cause of the trouble? Or could some outside culprit be the source of the danger in the small town?

One thing is for sure, someone is stirring up something sinister at the soon to be reopened train station. Henrietta’s determined to make sure Gabriela doesn’t hang for this crime. Join Henrietta in this first tale, in this post-Collapse world. Will her amateur sleuthing clear Gabriela’s name, or will she end up in the jailhouse? (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

Ingrid Torfa juggles two very different lives. In one she lives as an aspiring book illustrator in a quiet old fishing village on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
But in the other she lives as an apprentice volva, a Viking Witch, in a lost Norse village that exists half in and half out of the real world.
Balancing those two lives is trouble enough. But then a murder forces her to work in both worlds at once. She needs all her friends to help her solve this case.
But first, they all have to meet. And half of them are about to get their minds blown.
Murder on the Lake, book 3 in the Viking Witch Cozy Mystery series. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

F

From #1 Amazon, New York Times & USA Today bestselling author Gemma Halliday comes an average day in an average high school that suddenly turns deadly…

When Hartley Grace Featherstone heard the rumor that her boyfriend, Josh, was playing “hide the pom-poms” with the president of the Herbert Hoover High Chastity Club, she was crushed. When she found proof of his cheating, she was downright angry. But when she found the dead body of Miss Chastity herself, Courtney Cline, shoved into her boyfriend’s closet, Hartley was something else altogether… scared for her life.

Now Hartley’s boyfriend Josh—scratch that, ex-boyfriend—is the #1 suspect in a murder, the police are watching Hartley’s every move, and the only thing spreading faster than the gossip about Hartley is the fear that someone else at school may be next. Along with her faithful best friend and an unlikely ally in the bad-boy editor of the school paper, it’s up to Hartley to find out who really offed her school’s queen of mean.

Before Hartley becomes the killer’s next victim.

Hartley Grace Featherstone Mysteries:
Deadly Cool – book #1
Killer Looks – book #2
Wicked Games – book #3

“Irreverently funny voice… wicked pace… explosive conclusion!”
~ Booklist

“Halliday balances the comedy and suspense notes well, keeping her characters intriguing and her narrative bright. Suspenseful fun.”
~ Kirkus Reviews

“This fun and outrageous mystery is a perfect mix of humor and horror that will have readers laughing while they try to figure out ‘whodunit.'”
~ School Library Journal

“I absolutely adore this series and these characters… it’s smart, funny and full of heart.”
~ The Book Life

Rating: This book does not contain any scenes with graphic gore, violence, or sexual content. Its rating would be similar to a PG13 movie or Hallmark Channel mystery. Themes encountered by real teens are explored (including teen sex vs. abstinence), while keeping the overall rating and content appropriate for younger- and pre-teens. Consequences are shown for behaviors, and negative actions are not glorified. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

Two disappearances…
Lives forever altered…
A witness leads to a manhunt that’ll shape what’s to come.

She disappeared so long ago, but she’d never faded from his mind. Search and Rescue handler Caden Summers loved his life for the most part. He owns a little piece of wildlife heaven on the outskirts of town, has great friends, a side gig with Nightshade Securities and best of all—Renegade—his four-legged search partner and best friend.Suspected, ridiculed and dismissed.

No one can blame Aspen Ridge for resorting to a corner in the middle of nowhere to live her life after her sister’s kidnapping. Her cottage keeps her away from the society that once ostracized her. Her career moonlighting as Penny Sexton helps her keep a pulse on the outside world, becoming the person she always wanted to be. Her only complaint in life is that her past surrounds her everywhere she looks.

Rescued from a suspect retrieval attempt gone wrong, Cade finds himself nursed by a spitfire of a woman who isn’t afraid to wield a weapon in front of his friends—something he’d found oddly attractive—yet a little foolish considering their background.

When past and present collide, submersing him into the longest unsolved manhunt of his career, Cade knows one thing is sure. No one involved with this case will ever be the same again.

All it took was three days with the feisty Amazon for him to make up his mind.He’d help her find her peace.

Then he’d help himself to a piece.

Hopefully before all hell breaks loose. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

Christmas is anything but merry in Holiday Cove. The town’s Santa has been murdered, and Charlie Flynn’s boyfriend, Andy Brock, is arrested for the crime. As Charlie investigates the murder, she finds that Santa should have been the one on the naughty list.
County Commissioner Ben Norris may have looked like Santa Claus, but he was no jolly elf. He and the other commissioners were enacting eminent domain to take a group of farms, including Andy’s and Ms. Lou’s. As Charlie and her friends delve deeper into Ben’s life, they find he’s been blackmailing half the citizens of Holiday Cove. The suspect list grows longer, but finding the real killer in time to save Andy will take a Christmas miracle.
As long-held secrets are exposed, Charlie and her friends are tested like never before. Will the joy of the season be overshadowed by past mistakes? Or will they find the gift of forgiveness and the hope of new beginnings? One thing’s for sure; it’s a Christmas they’ll never forget. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback

It’s murder on the dance floor, as Cherry Hinton is about to discover.

Keeping temperamental ballroom dancers happy feels like a full-time job for Chris Gordon, producer of Expose TV’s Saturday night show Take a Dance on Me. So when Tatiana Pishkov senses that she is in danger, Chris is quick to persuade local detective Cherry Hinton to act as an on-set bodyguard.

Though Cherry is sceptical of Tatiana’s claims at first, it’s not long before things start to happen that make her story add up. Then her professional dance partner, Georges Berotot, is found dead and suddenly even the police start taking it seriously.

Cherry – who has her hands full making cakes for her Brentwood bakery and avoiding turning up on Watch My Ex Having Sex – teams up with her former flame DS Jacob Stowe to get to the truth of the matter. The murderer always seems to be two dance steps ahead of them, but can Cherry and Jacob solve the case before the live Grand Final turns deadly?

Editions Available: Kindle

Two New York City street photographers develop a deadly get-rich-quick scheme in this novel from “the grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy” (Ed Gorman).
 
Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed—until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary.
 
There’s only one way for Bingo and Handsome to muscle in on that half-million-dollar claim: Kidnap Pigeon and blackmail his coconspirator. Unfortunately, their foolproof plan comes with mobsters, a dodgy chorus girl, multiple murders, a refrigerated corpse, and the strange Mr. Pigeon himself, who, it seems, likes being a hostage. In fact, he has no intention of escaping. It’s the surest way to protect his own secret—which could be Bingo and Handsome’s biggest threat.
 
The first mystery writer ever to make the cover of Time magazine, Craig Rice is a “composite of Agatha Christie’s ingenuity, Dashiell Hammett’s speed, and Dorothy Sayers’s wit” (Louis Untermeyer, Gold Medal Award–winning poet).
 
The Sunday Pigeon Murders is the 1st book in the Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback, Audiobook

Former reporter Colby Jackson might be stuck managing a cheese shop, but when a local professor mysteriously disappears, her investigative skills kick into gear to try to find the missing man…before it’s too late.

Colby is making ends meet managing the Cheddar Haus, her sister Phoebe’s gourmet cheese shop, but she still has her sights set on getting back to her reporting roots. And Phoebe might just have the ticket to get her there…provided Colby does her a favor.

When Professor Boris Fleming goes missing, his wife—who just so happens to be Phoebe’s best friend—thinks Colby is the perfect person to locate him. After all, her horoscopes told her so. Despite Colby’s protests, she finds herself tackling the challenge…especially when Phoebe dangles an interview at the local paper as a reward for a job well done.

But finding Boris isn’t easy. As Colby encounters a web of lies, deceit, and misdirection, she discovers Professor Fleming wasn’t exactly the person she thought he was. The more she uncovers, the more she realizes the professor may have had many reasons to disappear…and lots of enemies who might have made that happen.

But finding out the truth may prove dangerous to Colby.

And maybe even deadly. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

Skeletons from their past are haunting their present…
is it best to leave them buried?

In the middle of the Long Island Sound stands the lighthouse at Execution Rocks. What happened there is the stuff of myths and legends. It is said that every so often residents can see the image of an abandoned ship, sails billowing, silently gliding past the lighthouse. A ghost ship some say.

Setting out to uncover the truth, Luce Porter teams up with the annoyingly attractive Detective who seems to conveniently pop into her life when least expected. Is it destiny? It’s a question they both face when they discover they share a childhood vision, along with disturbing family secrets. Tales of slavery and horror. Tales of abolitionists and saviors. Tales of patriots and traitors.

As romance blossoms, the two grapple with the blurred lines of American History while they challenge the demons from their own past.

For those who loved All About Annie, but were left to wonder, what about Luce? This is her story. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

Hazel Cartbell is back in her third mystery in the Who Murdered? series. It’s the Christmas season in Andover, New Hampshire and Hazel and Chief Rasmussen must investigate the death of Santa’s helper. The elf has been killed, the Christmas presents stolen and Sister Marie Catherine is breathing down their necks. The elf’s identity leads to more questions. He’s a career criminal who’s been wreaking havoc on the town and its surrounding communities, but sleazy lawyer, Victor Kendall, is determined to keep him out of jail.
As the cops begin to unravel the puzzle, lots of unexpected Christmas miracles occur. Goodwill toward men and all… Of course, what would a murder investigation be without the interference—uh, help—of the good citizens of Andover? Will Hazel and the chief solve the mystery and save Christmas?

The story is just over 31,000 words. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle

A murder right before election day might decide the vote!

A vacancy on the Spicetown City Council sends Mayor Cora Mae Bingham scrambling to control the squabbles between two grown men sliding into election day in fisticuffs, one trying to disqualify the other.

Amidst the election day antics, Cora Mae helps mitigate merchants’ concerns, soothe homeowner association hostilities, welcome new residents to Spicetown, and solve a murder that could create another City Hall vacancy. (Amazon)

Editions Available: Kindle, Paperback