Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Women Sleuths

Meg Langslow is spending the summer at the Biscuit Mountain Craft Center, helping her grandmother Cordelia run the studios. But someone is committing acts of vandalism, which threaten to ruin the newly opened center's reputation.

Going undercover is second nature for Private Investigator Lola Cruz, but she’s out of her league when the case of a murdered Royals Courtside Dancer leads her to a local nudist resort. Parading around the sidelines of Sacramento’s professional basketball scene in a barely there cheerleading outfit is one thing - but parading around in nothing but a smile? If she’s going to have any chance of hiding this from her traditional family and on-again, off-again boyfriend, Jack, she’s going to have to keep a lot more than her duct tape bra and killer dance moves under wraps.

When a dazzling destination wedding brings the Luzzi family to Hawaii, Lacey plans to take advantage of the sunshine and relaxation, along with a healthy diet of papaya and shaved ice. However, Lacey has her work cut out for her. Somewhere between traveling with a baby, learning to Hula dance from her grass-skirt-attired grandmother, and keeping Anthony's hands off her coconuts, new mom Lacey Luzzi is sucked into a pulse-pounding chase after her hotel room explodes and leaves a dead body behind.

Meg's husband has decided to escalate his one-man show of Dickens's A Christmas Carol into a full-scale production with a large cast including their sons Jamie and Josh as Tiny Tim and young Scrooge and Meg helping as stage manager. When a famous, although slightly over-the-hill, actor comes to town to play the starring role of Scrooge, no one expects that he's bringing a lot of baggage and enemies with him.

Eva Stewart has taken up a new hobby: photography. What better place to take pictures than the Great White Heron Refuge? While capturing the local wildlife on film, she stumbles across a dead body. Of course, the murder-mystery book club jumps on the case. Can Eva and the book club find another killer, or have they finally gotten in over their heads?

It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to happen on an ordinary Saturday morning. Her kids are arguing, and her husband is still sleeping. Lisa is tired and wonders why her husband keeps working late. Is he having an affair? Is it the same girl as last time? Lisa’s teenage daughter is acting up, and just as Lisa is about to walk up to her room and tell her who’s the boss around here, she feels the cold steel of a gun pressed against her cheek, while a hand covers her mouth. Years later, it remains a mystery.

Mr. James Harding was a lot of things - businessman, well-to-do, probable scoundrel - but a drinker he most assuredly was not. So when Harding is believed to have drunkenly fallen to his death into the icy River Avon, Lord William Wethington is immediately suspicious. Finding Lord William's name on a letter in the victim's pocket, the local constabulary summons William to identify the victim. Police detectives learn that William had been one of Harding's business clients - and undoubtedly not the only client the dead man had cheated.

With hundreds flocking to her inaugural garden party, meticulous Lilly Jayne hasn't left a single petal out of place. But the picture-perfect gathering turns unruly upon the arrival of Merilee Frank, Lily's ex-husband's catty third wife. Merilee lives for trouble, so no one is surprised after she drinks too much, shoves a guest into the koi pond, and gets escorted off the property. The real surprise comes days later - when Merilee is found dead in a pile of mulch.

Tinseltown's awards season is in full swing, and everyone is obsessed with dressing up, scoring free swag, and getting invited to the biggest awards shows of the year. But when celebrity publicist Lyla Davis is killed, the festive mood comes to an abrupt halt. Apprentice private eye Dayna Anderson thinks she's uncovered the killer. Unfortunately, what starts as an open-and-shut case turns out to be anything but.

It looks like the music has ended for Darling's favorite barbershop quartet, the Lucky Four Clovers, just days before the Dixie Regional Barbershop Competition. Another unlucky break comes when there's a serious foul-up in Darling's telephone system - and not a penny for repairs. And while liquor is legal again, moonshine isn't. Sheriff Buddy Norris needs a little luck when he goes into Briar Swamp to confront Cypress County's most notorious bootlegger - and what he finds upends his sense of justice.

The scene of the crime is lavish but gruesome. In a luxurious mansion on the outskirts of Cleveland, a woman's body lies gutted in a pool of blood on the marble floor. The victim is Joanna Moorehouse, founder of Sterling Financial, and the killer could be any one of her associates. Maggie knows that to crack the case, she and Jack will have to infiltrate the cutthroat world of high-stakes finance. But the offices of Sterling Financial seethe with potential suspects, every employee hell-bent on making a killing. When another officer uncovers disturbing evidence in a series of unrelated murders, the investigation takes a surprising detour.

Jaine has been hired by uber-pushy stage mom Heather Van Sant to write lyrics for her daughter Taylor's song in the talent competition for the Miss Teen Queen America pageant. It's different from anything Jaine has done before, but if nothing else, she's looking forward to a free weekend in a swanky hotel and a chance to see what really goes on backstage at a beauty pageant. But the hotel is a dump, the cattiness is out of control, and Candace - the perfectly coiffed, whip-cracking pageant director - is making even Jaine's life miserable.

Summer Merriweather's career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder's thread. So she spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with luck, will finally get her published, impress the dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack. Returning to Brigid's Island, North Carolina, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to sell her mom's embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore and go home. But then she finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: Sell the bookstore or die.

In the quirky, picturesque lakeside community of Lily Dale, where the residents can talk to the dead, young widow Bella Jordan is the lone skeptic among believers. She doesn't believe in ghosts…but after a year in the village, she would admit that her new friends do sometimes seem to know impossible things. Still, when a Black stranger dressed in old-fashioned clothing arrives unexpectedly at Bella's guesthouse at midnight on Juneteenth, only to vanish the next day as if he'd never existed, Bella's sure there has to be a logical explanation.

New Orleans, 1944. Sabotage—that's the word on factory worker Justine Byrne's mind as she is repeatedly called to weld machine parts that keep failing with no clear cause. Could someone inside the secretive Carbon Division be deliberately undermining the factory's war efforts? Raised by her late parents to think logically, she also can't help wondering just what the oddly shaped carbon gadgets she assembles day after day have to do with the boats the factory builds....

It's Alpenfest in Upper Sprocket! Yodelers are congregating in the square, tourists flocking to the town, and Trinidad Jones is scooping up some fall flavors at her Shimmy and Shake Shop. The cherry on the sundae is her upcoming feature in The Scoop magazine. She's determined to serve up the perfect interview, but it won't be easy, thanks in part to her meddling Cuban grandfather, Papa Luis, who has decided to make Sprocket his home, setting himself up as a taxi driver in his classic 1951 Buick. But things take a turn when Papa Luis tells her he's found a corpse in his trunk.

It’s been nine months since widowed mom Bella Jordan and her young son, Max, moved to Lily Dale, the quirky, close-knit New York community populated by people who can speak to the dead...if one believes in that kind of thing. Now she counts Valley View, the guesthouse she runs, as home and her psychic medium neighbors as friends - even haughty British Pandora, who used to own Valley View before her difficult divorce. So when Pandora sweeps in, requesting an urgent tête-à-tête, Bella expects it to be another complaint about book club. It isn’t.

The late summer heat in Echo Valley, Colorado, turns lush greenery into a tinder-dry landscape. When a young girl mysteriously disappears, long-buried grudges rekindle. Of the two Flores girls, Marisa was the one people pegged for trouble. Her younger sister, Lena, was the quiet daughter, dutiful and diligent - right until the moment she vanished. Detective Jo Wyatt is convinced the 11-year-old girl didn’t run away and that a more sinister reason lurks behind her disappearance.

After her divorce from her thrice-married embezzler husband, Trinidad Jones is ready for a fresh start. So when she's left one of her ex's businesses in Upper Sprocket, Oregon, she decides to pack up her dog, cash in her settlement, and open the Shimmy and Shake Shop, introducing the world to her monster milkshakes. Soon Trinidad's life seems to be churning along smoothly. That is, it was until she discovered her neighbor, the Popcorn King, face down in his giant popcorn kettle.

A young, inexperienced detective from the wet, working-class side of Hawaii's Big Island, Kawika Wong faces an uphill battle to gain the respect of his more seasoned colleagues. And he has the chance of a lifetime when Ralph Fortunato, the Mainland developer of an unpopular resort on the island's tourist side, is found murdered on a luxury golf course, an ancient Hawaiian spear driven through his heart.