Showing results by narrator "Michelle Babb" in All Categories

From the best-selling author of Lottery comes a new novel about greed, survival, and what's really important in life. At the bottom of the heap, there's nowhere to go but up. Waitress Tammy Tyree knows this intimately. Her life is a continual struggle of managing an eccentric uncle, looking after a younger brother who's not quite right, and doing everything she can to keep her family together in the small town of Spring, Washington.

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby's twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea, while mother Tabby, who also struggles with addiction, lies inebriated on the living room floor.

Abby Thomas is spending the summer in a run-down old house with a bratty pre-teen named Merrideth she is supposed to tutor. Not a dream job. But it does come with perks. There's John Roberts, a devastatingly attractive neighbor who is almost too wonderful to be real. And there's the new computer program Beautiful Houses - also too amazing to be real. No one knows how it works, but with it she can rewind and fast-forward the lives of all the people who ever lived in the house, including Charlotte Miles.

Having secrets can sometimes get you nailed! Alex Harris thinks finding a place to celebrate her one-year anniversary sounds like a good idea, but when her husband arrests her sister for murder she has some serious thoughts about staying married to the guy! Her sister Samantha is clearly keeping a secret and refuses to give the police an alibi, but when she asks Alex to help solve the crime and clear her name, Alex is only too happy to jump in prove her husband wrong.

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!

Visiting another century... not the summer vacation she had planned.Those who have read Time and Again and Unclaimed Legacy know that Abby Thomas is a college student on a summer service project with 11-year-old Merri. And they know that the summer is not going the way Abby had expected - but in a good way. For one thing, she meets a very nice guy named John Roberts.

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.

During the pandemic, camping was supposed to be a fairly safe activity. That's only if you don't camp with Frannie Shoemaker. Frannie and her husband Larry commit in the fall of 2019 to take on a campground hosting job in the spring of 2020. In that time, the world turned upside down, and their job came with a whole new set of challenges. But of course, where Frannie's involved, other trouble can't be far behind.

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.

Geocaching isn't supposed to be about finding dead bodies. But when retiree Frannie Shoemaker goes camping, standard definitions don't apply. A weekend in a beautiful state park in Iowa buzzes with fund-raising events, a search for ninja turtles, a bevy of suspects, and lots of great food. But are the campers in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often?

She knows a liar when she sees one. He knows a fraud when he meets one. 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.

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.

Over 200 years ago, famed explorer Meriwether Lewis died on the Natchez Trace under mysterious circumstances. Historians still argue whether it was suicide or murder. That shouldn't affect a weekend campout in the present day for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends, but it does. They meet interesting characters at a mountain man rendezvous and get mixed up as usual with the strange goings-on. Because camping can be murder!

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....

Frannie and Larry Shoemaker love taking their grandchildren, Sabet and Joe, camping with them. But at Bluffs State Park, Frannie finds herself worrying more than usual about their safety, and when another young girl disappears from the campground in broad daylight, her fears increase. The fun of a bike ride, a flea market, marshmallow guns, and a storyteller are quickly overshadowed. Accusations against Larry and her add to the cloud over their heads. Frannie begins to puzzle out the mystery.

Abby's weird computer program is working again. And it comes in handy when she and her friends agree to help the Old Dears with their family tree. Except Abby and John learn more about one of the ladies' ancestors than they ever wanted to know. Convicted in 1871 of murder and arson, Reuben Buchanan is a blight on the family's reputation. But was he really guilty?

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.

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.