Remi Finch is dreading her parents’ upcoming wedding anniversary celebrations. Not only will the festivities involve camping in the woods – not the natural habitat of someone like herself, who very much prefers to be indoors – but she’ll have to hang out with her two older sisters, whom she feels spent her entire childhood…
When Ruby Young impulsively decides to flee Baltimore for Boston, finding a cheap furnished apartment in practically no time at all feels like an answered prayer. While she does her due diligence – learning that the previous owner died unexpectedly from an overdose, hence the availability and affordability – the last thing she expects is…
While my favorite Jane Austen heroine is by far the capable and mature Anne Elliot of Persuasion, I’ve been accused often enough of being too much like the eponymous heroine of Emma to not have a fondness for her as well. So when I heard that someone was writing a murder mystery following the events…
Cafe owner Lila Macapagal is excited to participate in her hometown of Shady Palms’ thirty-fifth annual Corn Festival. She and her business partners Adeena Awan and Elena Torres have been busy cooking up various beverages and baked goods that feature corn, to be offered at the booth they’ve set up for the festival. Their wares…
Michelle Chouinard, under the name M.M. Chouinard, is a USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author. Her works include the seven-book Jo Fournier detective series and a standalone thriller, The Vacation. She earned a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Stanford University and is a founding faculty member of UC Merced. This fall, she published The…
Edie O’Sullivan is more than happy to settle into life as an octogenarian curmudgeon, jigsaw-puzzle enthusiast, and crossword setter of some renown. The only people she can tolerate on a regular basis are her adopted son Sean and her ninety-something neighbor Riga, whose eccentric glamor is capable of overwhelming even Edie’s own standoffish intractability. But…
Emma Oxley and Nellie Yarrow have been best friends since they were children, always being there for each other when the people who were supposed to love them the most not only failed but outright abused them. But as the day of Emma’s university graduation looms closer, free-spirited Nellie senses that her best friend is…
The Tudor monarch mystery that I never knew I needed came to life in Karen E. Olson’s An Inconvenient Wife. Taking the classic history of King Henry VIII’s six wives and setting them in modern day, Olson creates a truly clever novel. She explores not only what these women may have been like today, but…
Annie Adams is despairing of making a go of her writing career when she gets an unusual summons. Her Great Aunt Frances apparently wants her to come up from London to visit the village of Castle Knoll, where Frances has long made her home. Annie and her mother Laura have always been under the impression…
Readers will be hard-pressed to find a more original and laugh-out-loud debut mystery than The Expectant Detectives. The detectives are “a group of soon-to-be moms” who meet at a prenatal class. Alice and her partner Joe pick up sticks and move from London to Penton, a bucolic (and fictional) Cotswold “market town.” There’s some urgency—Alice…
