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Pulling Down the Barn eloquently recalls author Anne-Marie Oomen's personal journey as she discovers herself an outsider on her family farm located in western Michigan's Oceana County, in the township of Elbridge - a couple hundred acres in the middle of rural America. Written as a series of heartfelt interlocking narratives, this collection of essays portrays the realities of farm life: haying, picking asparagus and cherries, the machinery of tractors and pickers.

Nothing says Texas like a drive-thru liquor barn. If you've ever driven through one you know it's floor to ceiling liquor. It's like a museum. It's an awe inspiring collection of scotch, beer, whiskey, brown liquor, blue liquor, creamy white liquor, hard stuff, girly stuff, and mixed drinks. The bartender came to my car with a tray full of Styrofoam cups. Each had a sliver of clear tape across the straw hole. I thought, is he kidding? A piece of tape?

A trip down memory lane is fine if you don't stumble on a body. Frannie Shoemaker and her friends camp at Old Dam Trail State Park near one of Donna Nowak's childhood homes. They take in the county....

Hilly Creighton never expected to find a man when she peered into a cave near Tombstone, Arizona. Clint Woodrow had no idea how he was pulled forward in time from 1881, and he has been trying to get back home ever since. He doesn’t realize that the cave is the answer - the cave and Hilly. 

Harriet (Harry) Ferguson is engaged to be married...unhappily so. All she truly wants is a forever home, something she has never had. On a visit to her fiance’s mother in southeastern Arizona, she stops by a museum on historic Fort Huachuca, an army post dating to the late 1800s, where the wax figure of a handsome cavalry soldier captures her imagination - so much so that she can’t resist touching the figure.

When a traveling circus comes to the town of Wachita, Texas bad things begin to happen under the Big Top. Super-sized sleuths, Sue Jan and Lovita take to the tents to track down a crazy clown killer, even though Lovita is fixing to give birth in just a few short weeks. And if that's not enough, a scary Sasquatch is sighted in the Wachita woods, attracting a TV news reporter, a Bigfoot investigative team and a reality show film crew.

Sue Jan and Lovita put on their big-girl boots to solve a new crop of mysteries as their town gains a new antique and resale shop run by creepy twin sisters, a yummy frozen custard stand owned and operated by a quirky old man, and a trio of criminals operating under the town’s radar. With all that going on, a very pregnant Sue Jan is running for public office, and the town’s ancient sewage system is starting to act up.

With her wedding to Hudson just months away, all Lovita's plans seem to be going awry. A crooked politician is running for mayor, his girlfriend is opening a new beauty shop, and the contractor building Sue Jan and Monroe's dream home is found dead. To top it all off, the money from the high school band's fundraiser has disappeared. Before Lovita walks down the aisle, the girls have to nail a killer, uncover missing band fundraiser money, save their beauty shop, and rescue the town of Wachita. Piece of cake.

Murder, mystery meat, and morning sickness! Hudson and Lovita are expecting, and she's having trouble keeping food down for the first time in her life. Her best friend, Sue Jan, is busy juggling mommyhood. The Crown of Glory Beauty Salon and Boutique is busier than a one-toothed man in a corn-on-the-cob-eating contest. Things are great until a handsome law intern disappears after an argument with their top stylist's once-upon-a-time wayward son.

When Sue Jan and the gals at the Crown of Glory Beauty Salon and Boutique set out the egg nog and fruitcake at their annual Christmas soiree, they have no idea the town's senior citizen playboy, Bubba Bustalet, will be hit on the noggin with the fruitcake before the night is over.

Settling into her new condominium on Mirror Pond, novelist Sallie Chilcoat feels lost in Ashburn, Virginia, after moving to the state for love of a man. But with the end of that relationship, she finds herself at loose ends. She stares out the window at the pond and contemplates learning to kayak...or taking up painting...or climbing Mount Everest. Movement in the overwater gazebo catches her eye, and she grabs up her people-watching binoculars to see a man sitting inside the gazebo playing an accordion. 

Before the long nightmare ended, Darcy would often wish her mother had not opened that letter from an unknown woman. But, she did open it and shared it with her daughter, plunging both Darcy Campbell and Flora Tucker into a tale of an unsolved mystery, a web of secrets, and the discovery of an unsuspected traitor.

Frannie Shoemaker and her friends go camping to get away from the real world. So, they are surprised and dismayed to find their wilderness campground the production site of a new "reality" show - Celebrity Campout. Reality intrudes on their week in the form of accidents, nature, and even murder. They handle the situation with their usual humor, compassion, and mystery solving, because...camping can be murder.

A holiday novella. The Shoemakers and Ferraros plan to spend Christmas in Texas with Larry and Jane Ann's brother and then take a camping trip through the Southwest. But those plans are stopped cold when they hit a rogue ice storm in Missouri and they end up snowbound in a campground. And that's just the beginning.

In the time it takes for a villain to breathe his last, Anne and her mother, Dauphine, suddenly inherit Belrose Abbey -- a gothic castle set on a monstrous estate, complete with devious servants, mysterious forests, and the darkest of secrets. The more they settle into their new home, the more unsettling the house becomes. What do all the unmarked graves mean? Where are all the people who had arrived on the estate but then vanished? And could there really be an abandoned insane asylum on the property?

Kathryn Broussard has managed her life with dignity and an I-know-you-have-feelings-but-I'm-coming-through-anyway attitude. She exudes confidence and control over the land much as a reigning queen rules her court. Her main focus - Grace, her daughter. Although grown, Grace depends on her mother's razor-sharp decision-making ability for everything. All is well in the land of dysfunctional mother-daughterhood until the unthinkable happens. Kathryn dies.

In a steam-powered world, Miss Constance Haltwhistle is the last in a line of blue-blooded rogues. Selling firearms under her alias, the “Brass Queen,” she has kept her baronial estate’s coffers full. But when US spy J. F. Trusdale saves her from assassins, she’s pulled into a search for a scientist with an invisibility serum. As royal foes create an invisible army to start a global war, Constance and Trusdale must learn to trust each other. If they don’t, the world as they know it will disappear before their eyes. 

Quantum Tango: A Soul Searcher's Guide to the Galaxy is a bit of tango-istic magical realism. You don't need to know a thing about tango to enjoy the journey around the galaxy and the heart and the characters, especially Drs. Ocaramia and Nureyev, specialized therapists in treating TAD (tango anxiety disorder).

The Will Travel for Trouble series: short cozy mysteries featuring Minnie Crockwell, recreational vehicle (RV) enthusiast, and her ghost traveling companion, Peregrine Ebenezer (Ben) Alford, as they travel across the United States, discovering murder and mayhem along the way.

A biking and camping trip to southeastern Minnesota turns into double trouble for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends as she deals with a canoeing mishap and a couple of bodies. Strange happenings in the campground, the nearby nature learning center, and an old power plant complicate the suspect pool and Frannie tries to stay out of it - really - but what can she do? After all, she is only curious, but sometimes it isn't just cats who have trouble with that!