Showing results by narrator "Margaret Strom" in All Categories

When a reality TV show for aspiring opera singers descends on Wynter Castle, Merry's got her hands full catering to the endless demands of the distinguished judges and ambitious contestants. Then mysterious rumors about the cast and crew begin to surface, suggesting that some of their performances may be filled with false notes. When a dogged reporter with an eye for scandal who's been covering the competition is attacked and left for dead, Merry's determined to discover who orchestrated the heinous deed.

When Lawrence Lincoln wants to gift his life savings to help the sick granddaughter of Tricia Wellmore, a woman he met on a dating site, his friend and neighbor, Eloise, hires Kay to do a background check. Everything initially appears legitimate, but as Kay digs deeper, it's clear this internet match is far from perfect. Kay needs to use all her resources to find who the scammer is and bring them to justice before more lonely men lose their life savings to a heartless con.

Donations are pouring in for the charity yard sale, but as Kay and her friends sort through the glassware and gently used appliances, they discover a real skull in a box of old Halloween decorations.

After splurging to buy her childhood home in the Catskills, recently widowed Mikki Lincoln emerges from retirement as a freelance editor. With her ability to spot details that others fail to see, it's not long before Mikki earns clients - and realizes that the village of Lenape Hollow isn't the thriving tourist destination it was decades ago. Not with a murderer on the loose.

The stroke of midnight brings murder. What could be more magical than a black-tie Christmas party where those attending will socialize and rub elbows with the most prominent lawyers and judges in the state? Kay is enjoying the food, the wine, the conversation - and a dance with Judge Beck to the music of an elegant string quartet. But when she finds a dead body in an upstairs bathroom, Kay’s fairy-tale evening hits a sour note. Is the murderer a jilted lover? A rival for a lucrative position? A disgruntled client?

David Driver isn't the only one buried in his grave. Kay's friend Olive has a family feud on her hands over who should have inherited the only remaining plot in their family section of the cemetery. When a cousin finally gives in and agrees to relocate her son's casket, the cemetery staff discover there's an extra body in the plot.

When abrasive trophy-wife Stacy Mellomaker winds up dead on the floor of a bingo fundraiser few of the townsfolk are shedding tears. The doctors believe she died from an accidental overdose of painkillers, but Stacy’s ghost, as well as her sister, insist it was foul play.

It's been years since Bernie and Libby's parents became estranged from Ada Sinclair's side of the family - though the reasons for the rift are lost to history. The sisters, however, are intrigued when Ada makes contact. She tells them about the long-ago deaths of her father and his business partner, which happened within hours of each other - and were both ruled accidental.

On a wintery vacation with the kids, Kay and the judge stumble across a barn fire. What appeared to be an accidental blaze turns out to be arson, with the charred timbers hiding a dead body. Adding sleuthing to her holiday itinerary, Kay finds herself investigating and ghost-hunting the murder with two new kindred spirits.

With plans for a new performing arts center at Wynter Castle taking up all her time, baker Merry Wynter has been all but unaware of the fringe group compound near her small town - until a street preacher accosts her with taunts of doom and damnation. Worried that some of her close friends may have been lured in by the group and its charismatic leader, Merry begins digging into the ministry - and soon suspects they may have ties to the recent death of a young woman and the disappearance of many others.

Everyone is enchanted by Olive’s new puppy - even an initially wary Taco. Thinking she might want to add a furry friend to her own home, Daisy convinces Kay to go with her on a whirlwind tour of shelters, rescues, and breeders. But puppy loves comes to an abrupt end when the two women find well-known animal advocate Prucilla Downing dead in a pile of broken trophies and slashed fur coats.

Rat Island rises from the icy gray waters of the Bering Sea, a mass of volcanic rock covered with tundra, midway between Alaska and Siberia. Once a remote sanctuary for enormous flocks of seabirds, the island gained a new name when shipwrecked rats colonized, savaging the nesting birds by the thousands. Now, on this and hundreds of other remote islands around the world, a massive - and massively controversial - wildlife rescue mission is underway.

In the early 1960s, the head of a prominent New York City Child Development Center and a psychiatrist from Columbia University launched a study designed to track the development of twins and triplets given up for adoption and raised by different families. The controversial and disturbing catch? None of the adoptive parents had been told that they were raising a twin - the study's investigators insisted that the separation be kept secret.

Here is the essential guide to kick-starting a career you love in any job market. There is an epidemic in this country, one that continues to spread despite fluctuations in the economy. A dishearteningly large number of people dislike what they do for a living. In this revised and updated edition of I Don’t Know What I Want, but I Know It’s Not This, career coach Julie Jansen shows how anyone unhappy with their employment - or lack of it - can implement a real and satisfying career transformation.

When Mikki inherits a nearby farm from a woman she hasn't seen in two decades, the unexpected arrangement comes with a big catch: forgotten diaries hidden in the neglected house must be recovered, edited, and published across the internet within one month. The lonely locale is like an untouched time capsule from the 1950s, and it was left behind for good reason. While searching for the mysterious memoirs and clues about the former owners, Mikki discovers that the once peaceful place was punctuated by an unsolved homicide and other rumored crimes.

A narrowly escaped tragedy has Suzette thinking about filling in the old pond at the rear of her property—or even selling off that section of land entirely. Kay’s friend and neighbor has tried to keep the remaining portion of the family farm as unchanged as possible, but pond restoration is an undertaking too expensive for her budget.

Still myopically chasing quarterly profits, producing the same product the same way, issuing directives to increasingly disengaged employees? Too many organizations cling to outdated practices - to their detriment and almost certain demise. In today's unpredictable, interconnected world, you cannot rely on the old rules of business to get stellar results.

Mr. Peter has lived across the street long before Kay moved into her house, and over the decades, the collection of old washing machines, lawn mowers, and refrigerators in his front and back yard has reached the point where it's nearly impossible to find the front door. The man is an eccentric recluse, but how can anyone dislike a kindly person who loves old pottery and dinnerware, and slips Taco, the cat, chicken sandwiches every chance he gets? Evidently someone disliked him - disliked him enough to kill him.

Kay acquired a beautiful antique sideboard at an estate auction, but a ghost has unfortunately conveyed with the furniture. Her stately Victorian isn't big enough for this additional spirit, but Kay isn't sure who is haunting the sideboard or why. And finding out the identity and motivations of the ghost might not be enough to convince the spirit to move on.

Forgotten on the outskirts of quaint Lenape Hollow, Feldman's Catskill Resort Hotel has outlasted its heyday as a popular tourist destination and now awaits demolition. But once Mikki is hired to edit a revealing memoir by Sunny Feldman, the doomed resort quickly ends up back in the spotlight. Unfortunately, everyone's attention shifts to Mikki when a body is discovered at the demolition site. Seen arguing with deceptive entrepreneur Greg Onslow right before his shocking death, the editor has no choice but to spell out exactly why she isn't guilty of murdering him.