Christy Castleman, a pretty, young novelist, has made a name for herself writing books about mystery and intrigue. The Sassy Snowbirds, a group of lively ladies, spread fun, friendship, and good deeds around the seaside town of Summer Breeze. Everyone is content in their cozy world–until a message is found in a small Victorian glass bottle half buried in the sand.
“Call the police. Someone is trying to kill me.”
Believing the...

A collection of thirty-three stories showing the scope, vigour, and enduring fascination of the detective story.

Paul James Watson is the writer of mid-list paperback novels. He escapes from his humdrum life by being absorbed in his novels and his character, Toby McKenna, a highly successful detective. It is not long before the lines of reality, fiction and imagination become so entwined that the real Watson threatens to become lost.

Murder and mystery continue in Book Four of the Cape Refuge series A famous mystery writer has just moved to Cape Refuge when a teenage girl is found murdered. Sheila Caruso–ex-con, mother to Sadie and Caleb, and resident of Hanover House–is working for the writer when she discovers that a scene in one of his novels matches the crime scene. When Police Chief Cade and Blair Owens discover a second dead teenager–mirroring a murder

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Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood]). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy readers who are sick and tired of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society....

To look at her, one would never think suburbanite homemaker Jane Jeffry would be interested in murder and mayhem. But given the corpses she's come across she's practically an expert on the subject. Which is why Jane's booking down to a nearby mystery writers' convention to mingle with the brightest lights of literary crime, and maybe drum up some interest in her own recently completed manuscript. But when a famous ego-squashing editor keels over at...

Charlie Howard doesn't just write books about a career thief, he also happens to be one.In Amsterdam working on his latest novel, Charlie is approached by a mysterious American who asks him to steal two apparently worthless monkey figurines from two separate addresses on the same night. At first, he says no. Then he changes his mind. Only later, kidnapped and bound to a chair, the American very dead, and a spell in police custody behind him, does...