Backlist Books
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How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries
Kathy Lynn Emerson
ISBN 978-880284-92-6
226 pages, Trade Paperback Original, $14.95
Publication Date: April 2008
The 2009 Agatha winner for best nonfiction book!
THE ART & ADVENTURE OF SLEUTHING THROUGH THE PAST
“Kathy Lynn Emerson takes the mystery out of writing a historical mystery. The book is a comprehensive guide, full of seasoned advice and rich examples.”
—Hallie Ephron, author of Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel and the Peter Zak series
“I can’t imagine a question about historical mysteries that isn’t answered here. The past is a foreign country, and Kathy Lynn Emerson is a wonderfully informative tour guide. Do not start writing your historical mystery without this book!”
—Carolyn Wheat, author of How To Write Killer Fiction and the Cass Jameson series
This useful, fascinating, and complete guide will inspire and delight writers (and readers, too) of historical mysteries. These books are the most enjoyable and memorable way to experience history up close and personal—with a brain-teasing puzzle thrown in as a bonus. Ranging from the eras of ancient civilizations to Japanese samurai to the twentieth-century private eye, from Renaissance Europe to the American frontier, they open a vast historical panorama to the curious reader who enjoys murder and mayhem along with past mores and morals. This sub-genre is growing in popularity every year. Writing these mysteries is an art, and you can learn here how it’s done.
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Deadly Vintage—A Molly Doyle Mystery
Elaine Flinn
ISBN 978-1-880284-87-2
264 pages, Trade Paperback Original, $14.95
Caveat Emptor should have been Molly Doyle’s watchword when she took on the redecoration of a celebrated winery—along with In Vino Veritas.
“You don’t need to know anything about antiques to recognize when you’ve found a genuine treasure. Elaine Flinn’s Molly Doyle series gives the reader that same warm glow. Witty and skillfully plotted, Deadly Vintage has a cast of characters you can believe in. Look no further for the perfect traditional mystery.”
—Stephen Booth (Barry and CWA Dagger award-winning author of The Dead Place)
“Barry Award-winner Elaine Flinn is at the top of her game. Deadly Vintage is champagne and caviar, the best yet in the intriguing and delightful Molly Doyle series. Flinn’s story-telling will pop your cork.”
—Julia Spencer-Fleming (Agatha, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winning author of All Mortal Flesh)
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Face Down O’er the Border—A Lady Appleton Mystery
Kathy Lynn Emerson
ISBN 978-880284-91-9
232 pages, Trade Paperback Original, $14.95
When Catherine, Lady Glenelg is accused of murder in Scotland, what else can her old friend and sister-in-law Lady Appleton do but head for the Border?
“Face Down O’er the Border is just wonderful. Susanna Appleton is as fresh and clever as in the first volume; in fact, I think she has grown more appealing over the years. In addition, the Scots setting provides some new and surprising quirks to historical law. I am already looking forward to the next book.”
—Roberta Gellis, author of Chains of Folly
“Susanna, Lady Appleton sallies forth to the north into a Scottish intrigue that kept me guessing (usually wrong) throughout. Real characters face real perils, interspersed with political machinations and studded with lots of nifty period details. When everything looks at its bleakest, you want Susanna on your side. It is good to encounter her again.”
—Alan Gordon, author of The Lark’s Lament
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Hot Rocks—A Nick Hoffman Mystery
Lev Raphael
ISBN 978-1-880284-83-4
216 pages, Trade Paperback Original, $14.95
Fitness = Death, when Nick Hoffman heads back to the gym after his Caribbean vacation, finding himself caught in a Desperate Housewives-type mystery.
Just back from their Caribbean vacation, SUM professor Nick Hoffman and his partner, Stefan Borowski, need to get back in shape. Michigan Muscle is a luxurious health club near the State University of Michigan. With the latest equipment and top-notch personal trainers, it‘s a palatial complex for fitness. But every palace has its intrigue, and when Nick finds a dead trainer in the steam room, he‘s drawn into a web of passion and privilege unlike anything he‘s experienced before. The prime suspect because he discovered the body, Nick has to work out this mystery to its bitter end.
“At the start of Raphael‘s entertaining seventh Nick Hoffman mystery, the State University of Michigan English professor stumbles on a corpse in a steam room…(has) many amusing and eclectic literary references that alternate with salacious gossip and humorous philosophical rants.”
—Publishers Weekly
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Blood Matters—A Roxanne Prescott Mystery
Taffy Cannon
ISBN 978-1-880284-86-5
248 pages, Trade Paperback Original, $14.95
Everybody loved adoption guru Sam Brennan, a compulsive collector who made his life’s work the creation of adoptive families and the reunion of birth relatives—until somebody beat him to death with a statuette of Michael Jackson. San Diego Homicide Detective Roxanne Prescott takes on the baffling murder and looks for answers in Brennan’s contradictory past, among the women who loved him, and in the business deals that formed the framework of his rags-to-riches life and death.
“In Cannon’s suspenseful second Roxane Prescott mystery…Prescott sets a trap to entice the killer as this expertly paced police procedural advances to a startling conclusion.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A transplanted Texan helps solve a quirky California murder…. The solid police procedural moves along smoothly until the well-disguised villain is revealed.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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Family Business
A Port Silva Mystery
Janet LaPierre
ISBN 978-1-880284-85-8
296 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
“Set in 2002, LaPierre's crisply plotted ninth Port Silva mystery features mother-daughter sleuths.… Blending contemporary issues and family conflicts with a solid mystery plot, the author reaffirms her fluid mastery of the cozy.” —Publishers Weekly (7/17/06)
In October 2002, after the Port Silva City Council denies a group of citizens permission for a demonstration against an ever-more-likely war in Iraq, the organizers take their planning underground. A few days later, some one thousand silent anti-war protesters march the city streets to a coastal park, where their peaceful demonstration degenerates into a riot that crowds jail cells and the emergency ward, and leaves one local man lost in the stormy sea, another simply missing. As Chief Gutierrez struggles to protect angry citizens from one another and find the missing man, Patience and Verity Mackellar are hired to look into the background of the man who presumably drowned, and find that he’s not who he said he was.
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Eye of God
A Mystery
Jon L. Breen
ISBN 978-1-880284-89-6
216 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Al Hasp and Norm Carpenter are partners in a successful Orange County, California, private investigation firm. When Norm, the brains of the outfit, announces he has become a born-again Christian and will be quitting the business, Al gets him to stay aboard for one final case: going undercover for a televangelist Vincent Majors (who Al believes is a phony) to find out who’s been leaking secrets to a hostile journalist and an atheist organization. The case gets more complicated when Majors’s son-in-law, a pro-basketball coach, is murdered. Norm, Al, and their female operative Chris Borden are all on the scene when the case reaches a climax at a Christian college on the Southern California coast.
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Moonblind
A Gail McCarthy Mystery
Laura Crum
ISBN 978-1-880284-90-2
192 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Gail, seven months pregnant, is on leave from her work as a horse vet. Despite her firm intention to rest and prepare for her baby, she is drawn into the odd situation surrounding her cousin Jenny, who claims that she is being stalked. Newly relocated from Michigan, Jenny hints at nefarious dealings in her past as a racehorse trainer that may return to haunt her; and accidents seem to happen with astonishing frequency at her Thoroughbred lay-up farm. As Jenny’s only relative and friend in the area, Gail feels the need to support and help her cousin, but can hardly sort out truth from fiction as she tries to discover who the stalker might be. Jenny’s ex-husband, her former lover, the lover’s ex-wife, an unscrupulous player on the racehorse scene? Gail finds herself confused and frustrated, while she struggles at the same time to solve a medical mystery involving one of her own horses. As the accidents at Jenny’s farm become more serious, Gail’s concern becomes desperate and personal, leading her to a dark confrontation where she must use all her wits to survive.
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Face Down Beside St. Anne's Well
A Face Down Mystery
Featuring Susanna, Lady Appleton
Kathy Lynn Emerson
ISBN 978-1-880284-82-7
240 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
The year is 1575, and Rosamond, sleuth Susanna Appleton's twelve-year-old foster daughter, is certain her French tutor has been murdered. Lady Appleton is not so sure, but she knows something is wrong at Buxton. The ancient Roman baths there are popular with courtiers and spies alike…and the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots is clamoring to pay another visit to the healing waters.
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The Last Full Measure
A Katy Green Mystery
Hal Glatzer
ISBN 978-1-880284-84-1
240 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
A pleasure cruise, a treasure hunt, swing music, and murder—who could ask for anything more? In late November 1941, swing musician Katy Green joins two old friends in a dance-band on the SS Lurline, enroute to Honolulu. Hidden treasure at their destination could make them rich, but international intrigue could kill them first, because murder—as well as World War II—is in the offing.
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Crimson Snow
A Hilda Johansson Mystery
Jeanne M. Dams
ISBN 978-1-880284-79-7
256 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
“It is always a pleasure to visit the Studebaker Mansion with Hilda Johansson, the likeable, quick-thinking Swedish maid. In addition to the suspense of a mystery based on a true crime, Jeanne Dams gives us a great feel for immigant life at the turn of the century, with the gulf between rich and poor and the tensions between various ethnic groups. Not to mention the cold of an Indiana winter—brrr! Dams captures it all so well.”
—Rhys Bowen, author of In Like Flynn and Evan Blessed,
and winner of the Agatha, Anthony, and Herodotus awards
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Paradise Lost
A Novel of Suspense
Taffy Cannon
ISBN 978-1-880284-80-3
288 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
“Smart and atmospheric, Paradise Lost is paradise found for anyone who loves a brain-tickling mystery. Taffy Cannon delivers a textured tale filled with nuanced characters and authentic detail, set in the affluent seaside resort of Santa Barbara. At an exclusive health spa—where beauty is sought at any price—crime, desire, and misplaced idealism clash with riveting drama in Cannon’s talented hands. This is bedtime reading at its best.”
—Gayle Lynds, author of The Coil and The Last Spymaster
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Face Down Below the Banqueting House
A Lady Appleton Mystery
Kathy Lynn Emerson
ISBN 978-1-880284-71-1
232 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Shortly before a royal visit to Leigh Abbey, the home of sixteenth-century sleuth Susanna Appleton, a man dies in a fall from a banqueting house. Is his death part of some treasonous plot against Elizabeth Tudor? Or is it merely murder?
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Evil Intentions
A Feng Shui Mystery
by Denise Osborne
ISBN 978-1-880284-77-3
186 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
A shocking and questionable suicide linked to white slavery and to members of an elite Washington D.C. family embroils Feng Shui practitioner Salome Waterhouse in an investigation that threatens everyone involved.
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Tropic of Murder
A Nick Hoffman Mystery
Lev Raphael
ISBN 978-1-880284-68-1
216 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Professor Nick Hoffman flees mounting chaos at the State University of Michigan for a Caribbean getaway, but his winter paradise turns into a nightmare of deceit, danger, and revenge.
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Death Duties
A Port Silva Mystery
Janet LaPierre
ISBN 978-1-880284-74-2
288 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
The mother-and-daughter private investigative team introduced in Keepers, Patience and Verity Mackellar, take on a challenging new case. A visitor to Port Silva hires them to clear her grandfather of anonymous charges that caused his suicide there thirty years earlier.
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A Fugue in Hell's Kitchen
A Katy Green Mystery
Hal Glatzer
ISBN 978-1-880284-70-4
240 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Hal Glatzer has been a journalist and novelist for more than 30 years. He plays swing guitar and composed three songs for the audio-play of his Too Dead To Swing. Classically trained, once employed as a music conservatory librarian, and a director of the Art Deco Society, Glatzer has the ideal background to write this book. He and his wife divide their time between homes in San Francisco and New York City.
For swing musician Katy Green in 1939, a classical music conservatory ought to be a tranquil oasis in New York City’s roughest neighborhood. So she agrees to help a friend teaching there hunt for a stolen music manuscript. A Fugue in Hell's Kitchen deals with rare manuscript theft and forgery, crooked land developers, and the gangs of New York. The rare and valuable autograph manuscript of a Paganini guitar quartet has inexplicably vanished from the friend's possession—and it may even be a forgery. What Katy first thinks will be easy pursuit of a petty thief swiftly turns into a deadly fugue of greed, jealousy, and zealotry, and a fight for her life.
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The Affair of the Incognito Tenant
A Mystery with Sherlock Holmes
Lora Roberts
ISBN 978-1-880284-54-4
264 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
In 1903, widow Charlotte Dodson’s livelihood is threatened by sinister events that converge on the small Sussex village where she is housekeeper at a manor leased by a mysterious stranger. The credulous villagers whisper that a vampire is on the loose. A man famed for evil has escaped from Dartmoor Prison and is drawn to the area. The legendary Orb of Kezir is sought by one who wants the fabulous jewel at all costs. And the mysterious Mr. Sigerson is somehow linked to these events. Charlotte finds herself at the center of a black conspiracy, and the man she comes to know as Sherlock Holmes is the only one who can help her.
The Affair of the Incognito Tenant takes the point of view of a passionate young widow, with whom Sherlock Holmes falls in love—as much as his cold, self-absorbed nature will allow him to love. As well as being an intellectual sparring partner for Holmes, and his match in deduction, Charlotte excels in the domestic arts. She manages to foil more than one villain (including Holmes' nemesis Col. Sebastian Moran) using common household objects and tools—much to the amazement of Scotland Yard and the gratitude of Sherlock Holmes, whose life she saves.
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Silence is Golden
A Connor Westphal Mystery
Penny Warner
ISBN 978-1-880284-66-7
240 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
Old prospector Sluice Jackson appears to have struck it rich with the discovery of a tooth-sized gold nugget. But when Flat Skunk starts turning up dead bodies, Connor Westphal digs for the story behind her headlines—and finds all that glitters isn't gold.
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The Beastly Bloodline
A Delilah Doolittle Pet Detective Mystery
by Patricia Guiver
ISBN 978-1-880284-69-8
192 pages Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
“The Beastly Bloodline is an entertaining and elegant whodunit—a classic and classy English country house murder mystery transplanted to Southern California soil.”
—Meg Chittenden, author of More Than You Know
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How To Write Killer Fiction
The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense
Carolyn Wheat
ISBN 978-1-880284-62-9
192 pages, Original Trade Paperback, $13.95
It takes brains to solve a mystery; it takes guts to survive suspense. Here are tips and inspiration for successful writing in either game.
Carolyn Wheat, the highly regarded creative writing teacher and author, explains the difference between mysteries (the art of the whodunit) and novels of suspense (the flight from danger) and offers tips of the trade for writing in either genre. Wheat shows how to make your book work, from the first word to the final revision.
"There are almost as many writer’s guides on the market as there are struggling writers, but this one is indispensable." —Booklist (5/15/03) Read the complete starred Booklist review
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