Showing results by narrator "Carol Herman" in All Categories

Angeline Sims is no shrinking violet. She’s tough, opinionated, bossy, and she’s got a bone to pick with nearly everyone in her life. Set in the fictitious Eastern North Carolina small town of Shelbington, Angeline has been given a terminal diagnosis, with mere months left to live. Upon learning of this news, her adult children and grandchildren come home for one last visit.

Seventy-nine-year-old wealthy Jewish widow Esther Kellerman lives in a small suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio. Esther thinks she has a pretty good life. She plays bridge, reads for her book club, and routinely drives her Cadillac DeVille into the mailboxes of her neighbors. Her latest mailbox mishap leads her to the doorstep of some mysterious new residents of her neighborhood. As she introduces herself to Sarah, the elderly woman who answers the door, Esther soon realizes that there’s something wrong with her. 

In the mid-1920s, Bessie Elliott and her husband Fletcher take in their six-year-old nephew John. They are determined to give him a warm and secure home on Stone Mountain, a place where he will feel loved and know he is always welcome. Having a child brings many changes to their daily life and even more for John, but it isn't long before he feels completely at home with his aunt and uncle.

While picking out a new suit for an upcoming TV appearance to promote her latest novel, celebrated mystery writer Iris MacKenzie has an unfortunate altercation with her ex-husband’s very pregnant new wife. When video footage of the incident goes viral, Iris’ career comes crashing down around her. Her publisher drops her, her literary agent drops her, and even her lawyer--who happens to be her own son--drops her.

In the second decade of the 20th century, major world events resonate even on secluded Stone Mountain where Bessie Elliott lives with her husband Fletcher. There's a great war, one that takes away many young men, including Bessie's kin, some never to return. Bessie's role of healer intensifies as she treats those suffering from the Spanish flu and tries to keep it from spreading further on her mountain. She defends a young woman who's in the middle of a controversy that threatens to tear her community apart.

In the dawning years of the 20th century, Bessie Daniels leaves her home town of Hot Springs and travels east over the mountains to live with her new husband Fletcher Elliott in the Broad River section of North Carolina. In 1906, they purchase 400 acres of the old Zachariah Solomon Plantation which includes a small house with a shack beside it, a branch of Cedar Creek and a row of dilapidated slave cabins... And ghosts.

When her neighbor is shot and killed in his hunting blind, 66-year-old widow Gertie Johnson seizes the opportunity to move on with her life by investigating his death. Gertie is abetted (and hindered) by her grandson Little Donny, man-hungry best friend Cora Mae, and word-of-the-day challenger, Kitty. It doesn't help that Chester's death has been ruled an accident by the sheriff of this backwoods community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Or that Sheriff Blaze Johnson happens to be Gertie's son.

"I’m a Stranger Here” could be the song title guiding Lizzie Baker’s life. In the five years she spent on Brown Mountain during the Civil War, Lizzie wanted nothing more than to find the light that transported her back in time and return to the 20th century. While fleeing from bushwhackers in 1864, Lizzie, her friend Abbie Collins, and fiancé Josh Hampton encounter a light Lizzie believes is hers. Hoping to get to safety, she pushes Abbie into the light, expecting Josh to follow. She and Abbie wake to find that this is not the Brown Mountain they remember.  

In the waning years of the 19th century, Bessie Daniels grows up in the small town of Hot Springs in western North Carolina. Secure in the love of her father, resistant to her mother's desire that she be a proper Southern belle, Bessie is determined to forge her own way in life. Or, as her Cherokee great-grandmother Elisi puts it, to be a whistling woman. Life, however, has a few surprises in store for Bessie....

When small town girl Bonita Faye's abusive husband, car salesman, and fishing guide Billy Roy is killed, she begins an adventurous new life that takes her from Poteau, Oklahoma to Paris and back again in a story of murder and redemption...and more murder...stretching over three decades.

Molly’s Memoir is a journey through the life and times of a woman who is raised by a Seneca Indian after she is abandoned on the porch of a log cabin in the hills of West Virginia. Growing up in the isolated Monongahela Mountains, she learns about love, faith, and of the craft of healing with medicinal herbs.

When a floatplane mysteriously explodes above the Alaska wilderness, investigators begin digging into the lives of the five passengers and the pilot. Was the target of the bomb the US senator in the midst of a hotly contended reelection campaign or her husband, a corporate raider with no shortage of enemies? Or could the bomb have been meant for the cannery owner involved in a contentious divorce, or the refuge manager who had a long list of adversaries, including one who vowed to get even with him? 

The body of a flashy real estate developer is found in Gator Lake, and the alligator is blamed. The Paradise Palms tennis team must find the real killer before their favorite gator, Big Joe, is hunted down and slaughtered. Packi Walsh's snooping uncovers real estate fraud, irate investors, an affair between a trophy wife and her tennis pro, and a connection between the friendly neighborhood pharmacist and the New Jersey mob. One of them tries to silence Packi by making her gator bait.

When the meanest gossip in Brea Ridge dies mysteriously, suspicions turn to cake decorator Daphne Martin. But all Daphne did was deliver a spice cake with cream cheese frosting - and find Yodel's body. Now Daphne's got to help solve the murder and clear her good name. Problem is, her Virginia hometown is brimming with people who had good reason to kill Yodel, and Daphne's whole family is among them.

I've always thought that Matlacha (say Mat-la-SHAY), the funky Pine Island Florida fishing village cum art colony, would be a perfect setting for a mystery when along comes Jessie Murphy, the perfect gal to sort out the riff from the raff of it all. You've got to love this lady - a Goodwill fashion queen who comes across as a ditzy airhead and whose best buddy is a gargoyle named Gar. Jessie's taken time off from her job, thrilled to be rekindling the flame of romance with her treasure-hunting guy, Will Rolins, who adores her.

How can you run a successful annual writers' tea party when your guest author turns up murdered, and when your choice for a substitute speaker might be the prime suspect?

Wealthy Cassandra Lennon has pricked her finger on the spindle of personal tragedy 15 years earlier and isolated herself behind rose-covered walls. They call her the Sleeping Beauty. But this is modern-day Texas and her castle is a ranch. Ellison Stewart is so enticingly attractive to women their knees buckle on first sight, and he hates it. Is he the prince Cassie has been waiting for?

Former diplomat Leona Robin wonders if she made a mistake moving to rural Texas. Her son loves it here, but in a place where it's normal for a prize bull to have his own pet pig and hay bales are raining from the sky, Leona wonders how she'll ever fit in. That is, until she's thrown right into local preacher Ralph Maybeath's arms. Is this love? Maybe, maybe not.

Olive Sommers didn't set out to solve a murder. But there's no harm in Olive trying to help, is there? She's got her wits, her sister's brains, and especially her 100-pound dog Boo, who gets along with everyone in town - except when she scares smaller dogs, or knocks people down, or eats cheese. But when Boo Radley sniffs out another dead body, Olive learns that murder can happen anywhere, and that small-town quirks can lead to big-time danger.

Who killed Polish Lou, the famous Prince of Polka Music? His daughter, musicologist Lottie Kachowski, comes home to the polka heartland of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to find the answer. Lottie has an unbeatable talent for using music to solve crimes, and she does just that on the trail of her father's killer. But the stakes turn deadlier than ever when another polka legend comes to a tragic end. As the danger rises, Lottie recruits her father's wacky girlfriend, Polish Peg, to help her dig deeper into the wild world of small town polka.