Southern Fiction Mystery

Maxine Bloom has always wanted to try her hand at acting, and when Loretta Bebe is desperate for someone to fill a role in the local play she's directing for the Honey Springs Theater Company, she asks Maxi to fill in. Aunt Maxi leaps at the chance for a big theatrical debut in the charming play. When the producer of the play turns up dead, the play comes to a complete halt until Sheriff Spencer Shepard lets Loretta reopen after the crime scene is fully swept. Roxy finds that she just can't stop from trying to figure out who killed the amateur actress...after all, the show must go on!

Old wars, new battles. Fighting ghosts, witches, and curses is nothing new for Max and Sandra Porter. But when a Civil War ghost gets tethered to their teenage son, J, everything is new. And terrifying. With the help of their partner and ghost, Marshall Drummond, the team will be up against serious and deadly problems - dealing with the head witch of North Carolina, raising ancient bones from the bottom of lake, breaking forgotten curses, and far more. But worse than that, they will have to face the most difficult challenge of all - J starts dating.

Quick Be Jack is another snapshot of the adventures and evolving lives of Jack Nolan, former Michigan attorney turned bar owner, and those who are a part of Cap's Place, his South Florida bar. He attempts to assist his friend, Detective Patty Johnson, who suspects that her partner leaked the information that almost cost Jack's bartender her life.

Southern California is where dreams come true—or so Scarlett Gardner thought. When she moved there and opened the Palm Trees and Page Turners bookshop, she thought her boyfriend and business partner would be part of the story. When he leaves her for a better job, Scarlett finds herself struggling to keep her new business afloat. And that’s not the only thing she has to worry about—she discovers something underneath the pier by her bookshop that she didn’t outline for her life’s story: the dead body of a book-buying customer.

When music mogul Teddy Paris, a former teammate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick Travers and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can't turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris's head that was set by a crosstown rival, a street-hard thug named Cash. Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid.

Sookie's beginning to get used to being surrounded by all varieties of supernatural beings - but even she has her limits. She'd really like to take a while to get over being betrayed by Bill, her long-time vampire lover, and get used to her new relationship with the sexy shapeshifter Quinn - but instead, she finds herself attending the long-planned vampire summit, the destination of choice for every undead power player around, as a sort-of human 'Geiger counter' for Sophie-Anne Leclerq, vampire queen of Louisiana.

With a beautiful and clever wife, a growing investigative business, and a baby due any day, former Bow Street Runner John Pickett finally has a respectable life far removed from his beginnings as a juvenile pickpocket in the rookeries of St. Giles.

Only 24 years old, Naomi Scott was just getting started. A law student, tending bar to make ends meet, she wanted to change the world. Instead, her life ended in the dead of night at the hands of an unseen gunman. There are no witnesses to the crime. The police have three suspects. All three men claim to love her. Could one of them be her killer?

When it comes to solving cold cases, nothing is ever cut and dried…. Quilter Beatrice Coleman is enjoying the sleepy peace of a tranquil afternoon…until it’s interrupted by her friend, Miss Sissy. The elderly lady is making wild claims about narrowly escaping an intruder. And intruders are unusual in tiny Dappled Hills.

With an extraordinary gift for suspense, McKissack brings us 10 original, spine-tingling tales inspired by African-American history and the mystery of that eerie half hour before nightfall—the dark-thirty.

The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own.

Sunset Jones has just killed her husband. Never mind that he was raping her. Pete Jones was constable of a small sawmill settlement called Camp Rapture where no woman refuses her husband. So everyone is angrily surprised when Sunset becomes the new constable and investigates murders in which her late husband might be implicated. Yet, no one is more surprised than Sunset when the murders lead her, not only to the conclusion of the case, but to a well of inner strength she never knew she had.

Andy Buckland is determined that nothing will interrupt her first Christmas with Malcolm Jones and her last holiday spent in her childhood home. When the family recipe book disappears from the Bowtie Angel, and Aunt Cecily threatens to put "The Eye" on the entire population of Beaverton if it isn't returned, Andy and Jones decide to put the eggnog on hold for a little old fashioned sleuthing. But as one secret leads to another and rumors are served up along with hot buttered penne, Andy can't shake the suspicion that her life is about to change forever.

MISSISSIPPI WHITSON knows two things: she has to find a new job, and she has to find one soon. When her elderly employer, Hammondsville’s district attorney, dies, the plan is to smooth the transition for his replacement and then move on. The plan is not for the replacement to be her employer’s grandson, an out-of-towner who doesn’t know the first thing about surviving small town Southern life. WHEN HE ASKS FOR HELP, she can’t refuse, being such a good person. But what started as a brief detour on her life plan may end up costing her more in terms of time, criminal drama, and matters...

A fresh murder in Arizona throws a family into chaos, and unravels a decades-old mystery. It’s been 20 years since the accident. A nighttime car crash on a desert road that left her parents dead and her sister disabled. Now a law enforcement officer with the Arizona Rangers, Michaela Sanchez has tried to get over the guilt she feels. She’s tried to move on. But when her brother is charged with the murder of a local activist, echoes of her family’s tragic night come crashing back. Michaela will do everything in her power to prove her brother’s innocence.

The Sovereign Order of Monte Cristo begins with a condensed retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, related through the voice of Sherlock Holmes. It includes exhilarating new adventures, characters, and ideas, carrying the reader through books I and II and into book III of an ever-expanding new series based on the classic. The author consulted the original French as well as the oldest English translations of The Count of Monte Cristo, but the style of the retelling, in the distinctive voice of Sherlock Holmes, constitutes a new work. Books II and III, incorporated herein,...

On a chilly November morning at the University of Georgia, a fraternity brother steps off a busy crosswalk and is struck dead by an oncoming car. More than a dozen witnesses all agree on two things: the driver looked identical to the victim, and he was smiling. Detective Marlitt Kaplan is first on the scene. An Athens native and the daughter of a UGA professor, she knows all its shameful histories, from the skull discovered under the foundations of Baldwin Hall to the hushed-up murder-suicide in Waddel.

Even in the chill of February, no place touches Harper McClain's heart like Savannah. She should be walking beneath the historic city's towering oaks, surrounded by graceful mansions. Instead, she's hiding miles away on Tybee Island after a mysterious voice on the phone warned her that someone wanted her dead. The call was too specific to ignore. The caller knew everything about her. But that was months ago, and she's getting tired of being scared.

For Max and Sandra Porter, building a family seemed unattainable. But since moving to Winston-Salem and starting a business with the ghost of a 1940s detective, the unattainable did not sound so far-fetched. Over time, they brought two homeless boys into their work and eventually to their home. But this ad hoc family has a lot of unknown histories. Dark secrets that threaten to crawl to the surface. When one of those secrets breaks through, Max finds himself in a fight - not only for his own survival, but for the survival of his family as well.

Alexandra Haywood and her sister Neely have always loved Whistledown, the family's Shelby County horse farm. After their billionaire father's sudden and tragic death, Alex returns to find the family fortune in shambles, and Whistledown has to go. But Joe Welch, the sexy farm manager, refuses to cooperate. Sparks of rage give way to a fiery attraction when Joe and Alex meet head-on. But just as a volatile passion flares between them, the discovery of a shocking murder with ties to the past rocks the county.