Amateur Life

Lady Emily Hardcastle is an eccentric widow with a secret past. Florence Armstrong, her maid and confidante, is an expert in martial arts. The year is 1908 and they've just moved from London to the country, hoping for a quiet life. But it is not long before Lady Hardcastle is forced out of her self-imposed retirement. There's a dead body in the woods, and the police are on the wrong scent. Lady Hardcastle makes some enquiries of her own, and it seems she knows a surprising amount about crime investigation...

It's autumn in Ashland, Oregon, - 'tis the season for a spiced hot apple cider with a serving (or two) of Torte's famous peach cobbler. It's also the perfect time for Jules Capshaw to promote her family's beloved bake shop by competing in The Pastry Channel's reality show, Take the Cake. The prize is $25,000. But as Jules quickly learns, some people would kill for that kind of dough. Literally.

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

While New Bern, Connecticut, lies under a blanket of snow, Cobbled Court Quilts remains a cozy haven for its owner, Evelyn Dixon, and her friends. Evelyn relishes winter’s slower pace—besides, Internet sales are hopping, thanks to her son Garrett’s efforts. In addition to helping out at the shop, Garrett has also been patiently waiting for his girlfriend, Liza, to finish art school in New York City.

Aunt Lavender is gearing up for the quest of a lifetime, while I’m settling into life in my newly renovated home and dreaming of long summer days spent on the lake. However, with the appearance of two old rivals in Winterspell and a harrowing premonition, our dreams fall into jeopardy. Selene has to prove herself right (naturally…), and before I know it, I’m chasing her furry behind smack dab into the middle of a cutthroat world of scheming adventure-seekers, who will do anything for their next big thrill. Let’s just hope she has an escape plan.

It was a simple favor. Check in on a friend. When Earl Jackson sends Will on a trip to remote Montana things go south quickly when Will discovers the bizarre purpose behind an isolated ranch. Caught in the middle between UFO believers and sinister forces, Will is propelled down a path that leads to cold and deadly depths while Andy finds her future in law enforcement threatened by an out-of-control political movement. Will Stewart encounters new adversaries and uncovers old mysteries in a gripping tale of hoaxes, murder, and questions that span the universe in Nine Lives Lost.

A peaceful van life retreat at a Florida beachside campground. A shocking murder. Can Julia solve the case before the wrong man is convicted? Julia Ross thought trading suburbia for the camping van life would be the adventure of a lifetime. A year after her divorce, she sells everything, turns her minivan into a camper, and heads to an idyllic Florida beachfront park for a month of sunbathing, biking, and self-care. But when a fellow camper is found dead in his RV, Julia's relaxing getaway takes a dark turn. At first, Julia wants nothing to do with the investigation—she came for peace, ...

They seemed like the perfect couple: young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Oak Harbor is a 168 year old plantation house in North Carolina that has been shrouded in mysteries since it was built. Millions of dollars have been stolen from the family trust. Murder, suicide, and violent death has stalked each generation that has owned the old estate. Some long-term residents believe that the house is cursed since it is rumored to have been built over a Tuscarora burial ground. Others believe that the evil goes back to the man who built the house, Dupree Durant. He was rumored to have been a pirate and sadistic slave owner who murdered for his own pleasure. The ...

They solved a murder before prom—now they’re retired, nosy as ever, and dead set on cracking one last case before someone signs them up for chair yoga and a senior discount. When Emma Lynn Whitmore returns to her childhood home in Savannah after losing her husband, she expects peace, maybe a little porch-sitting—not a fifty-year-old mystery clawing its way out of the attic. A faded photograph, a broken promise, and a name no one’s dared mention in decades all point to one thing: Delilah didn’t run away. She vanished. Teaming up with her old high school partners-in-crime-solving—...

The year is rapidly drawing to an end, Hettie the tortoise is hibernating and Agnes, Charlie, Marshall, and the other elderly residents of Sunset Hall are going stir-crazy at home. They’ve had enough of the broken boiler, drafty bedrooms, and Christmas jingles on the radio. And to top it off, another series of murders is rocking the hamlet of Duck End. It seems like every villager and his dog is trying to make up for all of the thwarted murders of the past thirty years.

When Olivia Shaw’s mother dies, the sophisticated food editor is astonished to learn she’s inherited a centuries-old English estate—and a title to go with it. Raw with grief and reeling from the knowledge that her reserved mother hid something so momentous, Olivia leaves San Francisco and crosses the pond to unravel the mystery of a lifetime. One glance at the breathtaking Rosemere Priory and Olivia understands why the manor, magnificent even in disrepair, was the subject of her mother’s exquisite paintings. What she doesn’t understand is why her mother never mentioned it.

A locked gate, a missing grave, and a secret someone’s killing to keep buried. When Emma Lynn Whitmore agrees to catalog gravestones in Savannah’s eerie Holly Hill Cemetery, she expects Spanish moss and ghost stories—not a historian’s body among the crumbling tombs and a chilling link to a murder decades ago behind the same iron fence. With her sassy Savannah Sleuths—sharp-tongued Margaret, eagle-eyed Graham, and tech-wizard Wren with her sly grin—the crew dives into a mystery as tangled as Lowcountry vines. A missing heirloom map and whispers of an old betrayal point to a ...

"A rocket ride of action, political intrigue, and suspense."—San Diego Magazine "A sharp thriller. Russell has us in the palm of his hand."—Chicago Tribune "Ingeniously imagined and skillfully told, Political Suicide must be included in any list of this year's best thrillers."—San Diego Union-Tribune Will Travis is an undercover corporate investigator whose job involves low-key assignments like checking out the service at Washington, DC, hotel bars and reporting back to management. But his evening takes an unexpected turn when he interrupts an attempted murder. Soon, Will is on the ...

Declutterer Ellen Curtis has been working to bring order into the life of Cedric Waites, a recluse in his eighties who hasn't left his house or let anyone inside it since his wife died. On one of her regular visits, Ellen finds the old man dead. It's sad but, given his age, perhaps not unexpected, and nothing to get worked up about...until the police raise the suspicion that Cedric might have been poisoned!

Laos, 1981: When an unofficial mailman drops off a strange bilingual diary, Dr. Siri is intrigued. Half is in Lao, but the other half is in Japanese, which no one Siri knows can read; it appears to have been written during the Second World War. Most mysterious of all, it comes with a note stapled to it: Dr. Siri, we need your help most urgently. But who is “we”, and why have they left no return address?

It’s been ten years since Jade lost her father in a tragic accident, and the lingering guilt and grief have dragged her down to rock bottom. Then one night, she’s out at a restaurant and sees the impossible through the window: her father, alive. By the time she reaches the crowded sidewalk, he has disappeared. After so much despair, Jade isn’t going to lose him again—no matter what sinister truths may come from following him.

Life on the outside is looking pretty good...at least it was for a few days. All it took was one revelation to ruin everything and now Eeva is once again alone and hurt. But the police aren't done with Eeva yet and when they want her to use her powers to help solve an apparent suicide, she turns them down flat. All she wants is to bury herself in yarn projects and forget the world exists...but fate has a funny way of handing out impossible situations and before she knows what's happening, Eeva finds herself back in the one place she hates most. The morgue. Follow Eeva and her delinquent ...

Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason customers stop by. The father-daughter duo are 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories—dishes that may well hold the keys to their forgotten past and future happiness. The restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to vanished moments, creating a present full of possibility.

An art historian finds – then loses – a portrait by Johannes Vermeer in this thrilling art mystery set in Munich, Heidelberg, and Amsterdam. When Zelda Richardson investigates a new lead about a missing portrait by Johannes Vermeer, no one expects her to actually find the painting in a retired art dealer’s home in Munich, Germany. Not her parents visiting from America; her boss, private detective Vincent de Graaf; or the rightful owner of the Nazi-looted artwork. However, Zelda’s jubilation turns to horror when she arrives to pick up the portrait and finds the art dealer dead and ...