Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Amateur Sleuths

As war rages in Europe, the citizens of London flee to the country. At Pigeonsford, a group of guests plays cards - but Grace Morland knows the strong emotions that lurk beneath the placid social surface. She's painfully in love with Stephen Pendock, the squire of Pigeonsford, but Pendock's smitten with young beauty Francesca Hart. One afternoon, Fran debuts a new hat, and Grace's jealousy gets the better of her. She exclaims, "I wouldn't be seen dead in a ditch in a thing like that!" She will soon be proven wrong. Grace is found dead with the hat on her head.

If there's one art the French have mastered as well as fine cuisine, it's haute couture. Tabitha and Julia are already accustomed to sampling the delights of the former. Now fashion is returning to the forefront in Paris, as the somber hues of wartime are replaced by vibrant colors and ultra-feminine silhouettes. Tabitha and Julia join a friend for a private showing at an exclusive fashion atelier, Maison Lannet. The event goes well, but when Tabitha returns later that evening to search for a lost glove, she finds the lights still on—and the couturier dead, strangled by a length of lace.

Like many old New England families, the Kellings live to die. Although their family vault is spacious and comfortable, it will not do for Sarah Kelling's great-uncle Frederick. In his will, he demands to be buried inside the ancient family tomb at Boston Common, which hasn't admitted a new member in more than a century. But when the Kellings crack the old vault's door, they find a recently built brick wall - and behind it lays a surprisingly fresh corpse, a skeleton with rubies in its teeth.

Each December, the faculty of Balaclava Agricultural College goes wild with holiday decorations. The entire campus glitters with Christmas lights, save for one dark spot: the home of Professor Peter Shandy. But after years of resisting the school's Illumination festival, Shandy suddenly snaps, installing a million-watt display of flashing lights and blaring music perfectly calculated to drive his neighbors mad. Then the horticulturalist flees town, planning to spend Christmas on a tramp steamer. He returns home to find his lights extinguished - and a dead librarian in his living room.

The angry old men of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish club celebrate yuletide doing what they do best: eating, drinking, and greeting the season of giving with a spirited "bah, humbug!" Though well past sixty, Jem Kelling is a relative infant compared to some of the club's elder statesmen, and he has waited decades to host their annual Christmas scowl. And during his first evening as Exalted Chowderhead, he is thrilled to find the wine abundant, the chowder superb, and the humbugs as lusty as ever.

Brady Coyne never meant to become the private lawyer to New England's upper crust, but after more than a decade working for Florence Gresham and her friends, he has developed a reputation for discretion that the rich cannot resist. He is fond of Mrs. Gresham - unflappable, uncouth, and never tardy with a check - and he has seen her through her husband's suicide and her first son's death in Vietnam. But he has never seen her crack until the day her second son, George, leaps into the sea at jagged Charity's Point.

It has only been a few months since Sarah Kelling's elderly husband passed away, and she is struggling to adapt to life as a penniless young widow. To make ends meet, she converts her stately Boston home into a boardinghouse, a decision that brings something even better than money: the company of art-fraud-investigator Max Bittersohn. The budding couple is standing on a balcony, recovering from a second-rate concert at a third-rate museum, when something plummets past them. The museum has been robbed, and a guard has fallen to his death.

Though the inheritance from her dearly departed Alexander was meant to set Sarah Kelling up for life, it vanishes quickly in the face of hounding from charitable organizations and the IRS. Facing the loss of her stately Back Bay brownstone, Sarah opens her home to lodgers - deciding she prefers a boardinghouse to the poorhouse. Soon she is cooking meals and serving tea for a cast of quirky residents, a cozy little family that would be quite happy were it not for the unpleasant presence of a certain Barnwell Augustus Quiffen.

According to Max Bittersohn, he and Sarah Kelling have witnessed enough murder and unhappiness, so it's high time they got married. And though Sarah hasn't yet agreed to such drastic measures, she invites Max to summer with her at Ireson's Landing. But they haven't been in the house ten minutes when they stumble upon summer's first mystery - a mint-condition, antique Spanish mirror that is tremendously rare and valuable.

Following the death of her uncle Cornelius Vanderbilt in September 1899, a somber Emma is in no mood for one of Newport's extravagant parties. But to keep Vanderbilt's reckless son, Neily, out of trouble, she agrees to accompany him to an Elizabethan fete on the lavish grounds of Wakehurst. Held in Wakehurst's English-style gardens, the festivities will include a swordplay demonstration, an archery competition, scenes from Shakespeare's plays, and even a joust. As Emma wanders the grounds distracted by grief, she overhears an argument between a man and a woman behind a tall hedge.

1901: To showcase the marvels of his new "cottage," the newly completed Bellevue Avenue estate, one of the first homes in America to be wired for electricity with no backup power system, coal baron Edward Berwind throws a grand party. Emma and Derrick are invited to the fete, which culminates not only in a fabulous musicale but an unforeseen tragedy—a chambermaid is found dead in the coal tunnel. In short order, it is also discovered that a guest's diamond necklace is missing and a laborer has disappeared.

When 105-year-old Hilda Horsefall tells young reporter Cronkite Swope of a stone carved with Norse runes that once sat in the nearby woods, the writer starts salivating at the thought of breaking the news that Vikings once marauded through their sleepy Massachusetts countryside. But while he's jotting down notes, a scream rings out, and Cronkite finds an even bigger story. A farmhand has been burned to death by quicklime, and Cronkite gets an exclusive scoop.

Boston and its suburbs are stuffed with Kellings, and the city is about to get one more. Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn - a pair of amateur sleuths equally at home in back alleys as they are at black-tie balls - are about to have a baby. And if the child takes after his parents, he will be one of the cleverest infants in New England. But while Sarah is a month away from giving birth, she cannot let pregnancy slow her down - she has a murder to solve.

Though a few years past 60, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma is as vigorous as a girl of 22. She sings, she dances, and when the local fire department needs a fundraising boost, she's happy to jump out a window for charity. This summer, she decamps to Maine, to beat the heat at an island retreat for artists and great thinkers. There are writers, painters, a psychic, and a historian, and their company promises to be great fun - until a few of them go treasure-crazy.

Producing a Gilbert & Sullivan opera requires a special kind of madness, and the Kelling family is large enough and peculiar enough to undertake an entire company by themselves. For years now, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma has supervised these annual productions - from The Pirates of Penzance to The Mikado - and this year she has invited her cast of relatives to rehearse The Sorcerer in her stately mansion. The show is nearly ready when a team of burglars drugs the cast and crew to make off with a priceless portrait.

If she weren't so fabulous, the Countess Lydia Ouspenska might be considered a gangster's moll. The last time she met Max Bittersohn, Boston's famed art-fraud investigator, she was forging minute Byzantine masterpieces to make ends meet. But when Max bumps into her on the Common, the Countess is back on her feet. She has taken up with Bartolo Arbalest, a master forger currently masquerading as an art restorer. And as Bittersohn knows all too well, even the most genteel fraudster cannot be trusted.

Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn, have made names for themselves tracking down stolen paintings, sculptures, and, when necessary, the occasional murderer. But this is the first time they have been asked to find a missing Rolls Royce. When Bill Billingsgate's prize 1927 New Phantom disappears, they head for his estate on the Massachusetts coast, arriving - to their horror - just in time for Billingsgate's annual Renaissance fair.

August 1901: A fundraiser for a new Rhode Island Audubon Society brings Emma to Vinland, the Viking-themed seaside home of her relative, Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, where the guest of honor is Edith Roosevelt, wife of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Emma's observation of harmless philanthropy is proven wrong the following morning when one of Mrs. Twombly's houseguests from the luncheon becomes mysteriously and dangerously ill. Accompanying police detective Jesse Whyte, Emma discovers a box of petit fours supposedly sent by Mrs. Roosevelt.

On a rainy night in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, a woman throws a doll from the fifth-floor window of a gutted tenement, then leaps herself. From his own apartment a few blocks away, freelance photographer David Corman listens to the radio reports as they come over his headset. Corman is a man at the edge, threatened with eviction, besieged by his wife’s attempt to regain custody of their daughter, yet reluctant to give up the life that permits him to roam the night. In the woman’s dying fall, he sees the chance to sell a story....

An unpleasant man in every respect, university Professor Herbert Ungley is exceedingly vain. One morning, his landlady catches her cat coming in with Ungley's hairpiece between its teeth. It's clear something has happened to the old grouch, because he would never be caught without his toupee. Ungley is found in the yard behind his social club, with his head bashed in and his baldness plain for the world to see. Although the police are content to call it an accident, sleuthing horticulturalist Peter Shandy is unconvinced and finds there are too many unanswered questions.