It’s Christmas time and Sarah Booth Delaney and her friends are thrilled to be spending it in the city of Tupelo, just a few hours’ drive away from their own hometown of Zinnia, Mississippi. The birthplace of Elvis Presley has decided to add a slate of wintertime festivities to match its annual summer celebration of…

At thirty years old, Julia McWilliams wants to make a name for herself, even if ambition is considered a bad thing for women in 1940s America. She signed up with the newly formed US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) after America got involved in World War II, and is chafing to prove herself as a…

Clearly, when creating his famous protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology who finds clues in famous artworks to uncover international conspiracies, immortalised on screen by Tom Hanks, Dan Brown was onto something. Experts and academics make outstanding literary detectives. After years of study, their knowledge of their field is narrow but deep, sometimes…

Chapter One CORDELIA I didn’t know how long I sat cross-legged in the snow, waiting for the dead man crumpled on the ground in front of my building to wake up. Might have been five minutes. Might have been five hours.  As I watched, pellets of snow accumulated on his flannel pajama-clad legs and fuzzy-sock-covered…

Eight disgruntled Warner Prep students are on their way from their Los Angeles homes to a remote Colorado ski retreat for a digital detox. This trip was almost none of their first choices for their high school’s annual Senior Excursion. Their chaperone, the tough but respected school counselor Ms. Silva, is adamant that this will…

Dick Raynes is a mild-mannered chemist who is, frankly, kind of a loser. His ex-wife still runs roughshod over his life and his two children don’t respect him. But he’s still loved and needed by Dee, the younger sister who he practically raised, and her son Jesse, especially after the child rapist Dee helped put…

It goes without saying that there are many fictional female detectives I’ve read and wished that, one, I could walk in her shoes—or just be her sidekick—and, two, that have inspired me in writing my own female sleuths. Miss Marple is at the top, naturally. Nancy Drew, a close second. And Agatha Christie’s other lady…

Chapter Four Silence in the garden. I gaped at the pale foot and the ankle beneath it, then the boot in my hand and the sock hanging limply from it. I looked back at the foot. The freshly turned soil enveloped whatever was beneath it. “Oh my god,” someone gasped. A woman’s voice. Somewhere behind…

Chapter One Melody Schacht bounced into the kitchen, her springy blond curls accentuated by an enormous reindeer antler headband. The perennially cheery hostess at Delilah & Son, my upscale pizzeria, straightened her headgear as she deposited an armload of used plates into a waiting bus tub. “Everybody loves the food,” she said.  The plates she’d…

Agatha award-nominated author Ang Pompano has long been an ambassador of the crime community. A longstanding member of New England Crime Bake’s planning committee, he has been integral in bringing its companion anthology to fruition since assuming the role of co-editor and co-publisher (in addition to contributor) after co-founding Crime Spell Books with fellow writers…