Hopefully, you found some spooky books to add to your TBR pile last week! This week, I focused on mysteries for Halloween.
And as you know, Halloween also means that Nanowrimo is upon us! Yes, every year on November 1st, thousands of writers around the world begin writing a new book for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during November. There are write-ins and chats and buddies for support. I will usually write 70,000-100,000 words because my novels are longer than 50,000 words, and last year’s NaNo novel ended up being over 150,000 words. I am just about ready to kick off!
On to the mysteries!
You can still pick up Witch-Free Halloween for $0.99, a holiday short in the Auntie Clem’s Bakery series available only on my website.
And the first four Zachary Goldman Mysteries are on sale for $0.99 direct from me or at your favourite ebook store.
And more…
The Reckoning
Inspector John Madden—who debuted in River of Darkness—returns in a gripping post–World War II murder mystery
On a quiet afternoon in 1947, retired bank manager Oswald Gibson is shot in the head while fishing. In Scotland, a respectable family doctor is killed in the same
manner—and with the same gun. What is the connection? Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Billy Styles and local detective Vic Chivers are baffled until a letter from
Gibson is discovered that might shed some light on the case—a letter concerning former Scotland Yard detective John Madden.
Despite Madden’s legendary memory, he has no recollection of meeting Gibson or any idea of what their relationship might have been. Madden is happily retired from police work, but agrees to help his former protégé Styles and the clues they uncover only deepen the mystery.
When a third man is killed in a similar fashion, Madden and Styles find themselves in a race against time to find the killer before another man ends up dead.
Shallow Waters
A sleepy Oregon coastal village with secrets as dark as its January storms. A new, handsome police chief with his own shadowy past.
The last thing Port Stirling Chief of Police Matt Horning needed on day one of his new job was for the mayor’s daughter to turn up dead – stabbed to death – in a mysterious tunnel on a remote Oregon beach. Horning, escaping professional troubles in Texas, accepts the vacant job in Port Stirling, Oregon, looking for a fresh start in what he thought would be a peaceful coastal town where the far west meets the mighty Pacific Ocean. Nothing much ever happens here…or does it?
The crime doesn’t make any sense, and there is no apparent motive for the murder of little Emily Bushnell. She wasn’t sexually assaulted, her family is respected in the small community where everyone knows everyone, and there doesn’t appear to be a reason for her death. Human bite marks on Emily’s body discovered by the medical examiner during the autopsy add an even stranger twist to the puzzling homicide.
The Halloween Haunting
In book 7, Tess and Brady are planning a haunted house fundraiser so they can expand the shelter to include a top of the art training facility as well as a permanent residence for hard to place animals. During the decorating party they find a skeleton – a real skeleton – hidden behind a false wall in the attic. They turn the skeleton over to Mike but once they do everything starts going wrong and Tess wonders if they haven’t somehow managed to awaken an angry spirit.
Mike thinks Tess is letting her imagination run away with her but she trusts her instinct so, with Tony’s help, she begins to dig around on her own. The deeper they dig the more they find including a second more recent body hidden within the creepy old house.
Meanwhile, Bree and Mike are adjusting to married life, Tess finds out something alarming about her father’s life before he met her mother, and plans are underway for another Thomas Thanksgiving.
Double Illusion
Every parent’s worst fear is coming true – someone is kidnapping babies. Someone with icy blue eyes, who leaves behind a blood-red trail of lipstick notes. From Atlanta to Los Angeles, a young reporter and the beautiful nurse he loves, are putting each deadly piece of the puzzle into place. But still the baby snatcher stalks…down a deserted hospital corridor…in a darkened tenement… And with every step Victor and Anne take towards the truth, a terrifying secret waits…
The Babes in the Wood
With floods threatening both the town of Kingsmarkham and his own home and no end to the rain in sight, Chief Inspector Wexford already has his hands full when he learns that two local teenagers have gone missing along with their sitter, Joanna Troy. Their hysterical mother is convinced that all three have drowned, and as the hours stretch into days Wexford suspects a case of kidnapping, perhaps connected with an unusual sect called the Church of the Good Gospel.
But when the sitter’s smashed-up car is found at the bottom of a local quarry–occupied by a battered corpse–the investigation takes on a very different hue.
The Halloween House
Every town has one. The big old house which has stood empty for so long that no one really remembers anyone living there. The iconic subject of lore and folktales which hints at supernatural occurrences, tragedy, and family curses, that can be neither confirmed nor denied.
For the town of White Eagle Montana the house that served as the subject of ghostly stories by the campfire was a huge old mansion built more than fifty years ago by a wealthy industrialist as a summer home for his wife and five children. The house, void of love and laughter, served as a sort of luxury prison far away from the hustle and bustle of Hartford Harrington’s full and busy life in San Francisco.
Structurally, Harrington House had weathered the long winters and hot summers of northern Montana. It had endured long after every one of those five children had been buried in the little family cemetery at the edge of the huge estate. I’m really not sure why the place was never sold, or even lived in, by whichever Harrington relation inherited the place, but after the summer Houston Harrington jumped from the third floor window to the concrete bricks of the veranda below, not a single Harrington or Harrington heir had set foot in the place.
Until now.
The Adventure of the Scarlet Rosebud
A medium dies – but is it murder?
When Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson investigate the death of Marcia Le Fanu, a well-known medium, they enter an unfamiliar world of trickery and intrigue. Was Marcia Le Fanu cursed by a rival? Or does the truth lie closer to home?
To solve this case Sherlock Holmes will need all his deductive powers — and Dr Watson will be tested too…
Agent Running in the Field
Nat, a 47 year-old veteran of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes his years as an agent runner are over. He is back in London with his wife, the long-suffering Prue. But with the growing threat from Moscow Centre, the office has one more job for him. Nat is to take over The Haven, a defunct substation of London General with a rag-tag band of spies. The only bright light on the team is young Florence, who has her eye on Russia Department and a Ukrainian oligarch with a finger in the Russia pie.
Nat is not only a spy, he is a passionate badminton player. His regular Monday evening opponent is half his age: the introspective and solitary Ed. Ed hates Brexit, hates Trump and hates his job at some soulless media agency. And it is Ed, of all unlikely people, who will take Prue, Florence and Nat himself down the path of political anger that will ensnare them all. Agent Running in the Field is a chilling portrait of our time, now heartbreaking, now darkly humorous, told to us with unflagging tension by the greatest chronicler of our age.
A Fair Time for Death
The annual Chestnut Fair brings visitors from far and wide to the sleepy village of Trecchina. This year, one will be coming to die.
The moment Vanda Riccardi makes the grisly discovery in the forest, a blow to the head knocks her cold. By the time rescuers find her, the corpse is gone. Did she really see it? The carabinieri are sceptical, but her friend Giò Brando – travel writer and reluctant amateur sleuth – is determined to believe her.
As Giò and Vanda delve deep into the past to unravel the mystery – a past that someone won’t hesitate to commit murder to keep hidden – in the perfumery run by Giò’s sister, Agnese, three very different customers are destined to choose the same scent – one with a disturbing backstory.
Psychic Wanted (Un)Dead or Alive
When your exes come back to haunt you…
Halloween’s here and psychic FBI agent Ariana Ryder is ready to party. But a psychic has a job to do, and when a curse of vengeance born from broken hearts starts killing men all over Nashville, Ariana has to psychic up and get her butt to work. Everything about these supposed suicides screams ghost, but it’s doing things no mere specter can pull off.
The clock’s tickin’ before the ghost strikes again, and Ariana’s going to have to face her own past to stop it…
Because it’s just set its sights on Grant.
A Bell in the Garden
When the owner of a new business digs up buried bones on opening day, the rumor mill in Spicetown comes alive!
Mayor Cora Mae Bingham and Police Chief Conrad Harris are faced with the Chamber of Commerce President on a rampage, the sweet biscotti-baking neighbor living a lie, the notorious town floozy being misunderstood and everyone in town speculating about who is missing.
Figuring out who the bones belong to will open up the cold cases in Spicetown and unearth all the old gossip that was never truly buried. Cora Mae and Chief Harris learn a few things about their fellow citizens along the way.
Stirring the Plot
Jenna Hart has packed The Cookbook Nook chock-full of everything from ghostly texts to witchy potions in anticipation of the annual fund-raiser luncheon. But there’s one unexpected addition to the menu: murder.
When the Head Priestess of the Winsome Witches is found dead under mysterious circumstances, there’s no logical answer and plenty of blame to go around. With her aunt, Vera, unable to call on her ability to foresee the future, Jenna will have to use more than just sleight of hand and a few magic tricks to conjure up the truth…
