Mostrando resultados por autor "Charlotte MacLeod" en Todas las categorías

The rural town of Balaclava greets Groundhog Day as an excuse for one last cold-weather fling. The students and faculty of the local agricultural college drink cocoa, throw snowballs, and when the temperature allows, ice skate. But Oozak's Pond is not quite frozen this year, and as the celebrations reach their peak, the students see someone bobbing through the ice. Long past help, the drowning victim is badly decomposed and dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat with a heavy rock in each pocket.

Although he towers over his neighbors, Jim Feldster is otherwise unremarkable, except for his mastery of cow milking and his membership in every lodge, rotary club, and brotherhood that Balaclava County has to offer. And anyone who's met his wife, Mirelle, a vicious gossip with a hysterical streak, can understand why he never misses a meeting. But one night their neighbors, the sleuthing academics Peter and Helen Shandy, wake at 2:47 a.m. to the sound of Mirelle screaming.

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.

Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn't. Dittany is giving him what-for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill, and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn't the target.

An unpleasant man in every respect, university Professor Herbert Ungley is exceedingly vain. One morning, his landlady catches her cat coming in with Ungley's hairpiece between its teeth. It's clear something has happened to the old grouch, because he would never be caught without his toupee. Ungley is found in the yard behind his social club, with his head bashed in and his baldness plain for the world to see. Although the police are content to call it an accident, sleuthing horticulturalist Peter Shandy is unconvinced and finds there are too many unanswered questions.

Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn, have made names for themselves tracking down stolen paintings, sculptures, and, when necessary, the occasional murderer. But this is the first time they have been asked to find a missing Rolls Royce. When Bill Billingsgate's prize 1927 New Phantom disappears, they head for his estate on the Massachusetts coast, arriving - to their horror - just in time for Billingsgate's annual Renaissance fair.

For all the Kellings' quirks, no other family in Boston is more adept at throwing a wedding. So when Max Bittersohn's wife, Sarah Kelling, offers to organize his nephew's nuptials, Max is smart enough to stay out of her way. But when the art-fraud investigator stumbles onto a family mystery, he is drawn into something far more serious than the question of who will catch the bouquet. Stolen years earlier, the priceless Kelling jewels were last seen in Amsterdam, so how did they end up among the wedding gifts?

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.

Although he is a decorated officer of the Mounted Police, Madoc Rhys' 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 weather vanes of the famous craftsman Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes.

It has only been a few months since Sarah Kelling's elderly husband passed away, and she is struggling to adapt to life as a penniless young widow. To make ends meet, she converts her stately Boston home into a boardinghouse, a decision that brings something even better than money: the company of art-fraud-investigator Max Bittersohn. The budding couple is standing on a balcony, recovering from a second-rate concert at a third-rate museum, when something plummets past them. The museum has been robbed, and a guard has fallen to his death.

Emory Emmerick comes to Balaclava Agricultural University as a scout for a television station. Although the faculty and students are hardly ready for prime time, Emmerick's interest is in environmental programming - a subject that inspires even the driest Balaclava professor to wax poetic. In his search for material, Emmerick joins Peter Shandy and a few of his colleagues on the annual owl count.

Producing a Gilbert & Sullivan opera requires a special kind of madness, and the Kelling family is large enough and peculiar enough to undertake an entire company by themselves. For years now, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma has supervised these annual productions - from The Pirates of Penzance to The Mikado - and this year she has invited her cast of relatives to rehearse The Sorcerer in her stately mansion. The show is nearly ready when a team of burglars drugs the cast and crew to make off with a priceless portrait.

Like many old New England families, the Kellings live to die. Although their family vault is spacious and comfortable, it will not do for Sarah Kelling's great-uncle Frederick. In his will, he demands to be buried inside the ancient family tomb at Boston Common, which hasn't admitted a new member in more than a century. But when the Kellings crack the old vault's door, they find a recently built brick wall - and behind it lays a surprisingly fresh corpse, a skeleton with rubies in its teeth.

When the doddering patrons of the Wilkins Museum learned that dozens of their priceless masterworks had been stolen and replaced by forgeries, there was no one to turn to but Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn - the savviest art detectives of the Boston upper crust. Nabbing the crooks was easy, but finding the missing paintings has proven trickier. Years later, the collection's prized Titian is still lost, and the new director, loudmouthed cattle baron Elwyn Fleesom Turbot, is getting impatient.

Boston and its suburbs are stuffed with Kellings, and the city is about to get one more. Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn - a pair of amateur sleuths equally at home in back alleys as they are at black-tie balls - are about to have a baby. And if the child takes after his parents, he will be one of the cleverest infants in New England. But while Sarah is a month away from giving birth, she cannot let pregnancy slow her down - she has a murder to solve.

Though the inheritance from her dearly departed Alexander was meant to set Sarah Kelling up for life, it vanishes quickly in the face of hounding from charitable organizations and the IRS. Facing the loss of her stately Back Bay brownstone, Sarah opens her home to lodgers - deciding she prefers a boardinghouse to the poorhouse. Soon she is cooking meals and serving tea for a cast of quirky residents, a cozy little family that would be quite happy were it not for the unpleasant presence of a certain Barnwell Augustus Quiffen.

The angry old men of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish club celebrate yuletide doing what they do best: eating, drinking, and greeting the season of giving with a spirited "bah, humbug!" Though well past sixty, Jem Kelling is a relative infant compared to some of the club's elder statesmen, and he has waited decades to host their annual Christmas scowl. And during his first evening as Exalted Chowderhead, he is thrilled to find the wine abundant, the chowder superb, and the humbugs as lusty as ever.

When 105-year-old Hilda Horsefall tells young reporter Cronkite Swope of a stone carved with Norse runes that once sat in the nearby woods, the writer starts salivating at the thought of breaking the news that Vikings once marauded through their sleepy Massachusetts countryside. But while he's jotting down notes, a scream rings out, and Cronkite finds an even bigger story. A farmhand has been burned to death by quicklime, and Cronkite gets an exclusive scoop.

Newlyweds Peter and Helen Shandy are picking out flatware when a pair of gun-toting hooligans burst into the silversmith's shop, empty the safe, and leave with Helen as their hostage. Although the police recover Helen quickly, her professor husband is badly shaken by the ordeal. Early the next morning, the college's head of animal husbandry frantically reports another hostage situation in progress. Belinda, the school's beloved sow, has been kidnapped, and only Peter can bring home the bacon.