Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Women Sleuths

In June 1951, Edna Ferber heads to Hollywood to support an old friend, Max, who has found himself blacklisted in the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings, which have rattled Hollywood with allegations of Communist sympathies. She has no plans of becoming involved with the soon-to-be-released MGM film based on her bestselling novel Show Boat.

Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, daughter of a Jewish merchant, and mother of two small children, is a Christian convert. Agnes, her estranged sister, has returned to Paris with the news that she is to marry a German lord. She wants no part of her Jewish family, except the sizable dowry her father can provide.

The blood-stained rope and towel, the stray slipper, the broken knife - and the disappearance of the lovely Jennie Brice - were enough to convince Mrs. Pittman that murder had been committed in her boarding house. The police, however, were another matter. Without a tangible body, there could be no official murder charge.

Music-journalist Theda Krakow is caught up in investigating the rise of a dangerous new designer drug that threatens the musicians and fans of her beloved club scene. But she puts her story on hold when she learns of an animal-rights activist who was killed in a hit-and-run accident while trying to rescue feral cats from a ferocious winter storm.

The year 1916 was not shaping up to be a good one for Alafair Tucker, and finding Bernie Arruda dead in a ditch didn’t help matters. Alafair had not wanted to go to Arizona in the first place. But her 10-year-old daughter, Blanche, was suffering from a stubborn ailment of the lungs, and her best chance for a cure was dry desert air. So Alafair and her husband, Shaw, had bundled their sick child onto the train and made the difficult trip from Oklahoma to the home of Alafair’s sister in Tempe, Arizona.

After Madeline Maclin, former beauty queen and fledgling private investigator, married her best friend, Jerry Fairweather, and settled into his old house in the small town of Celosia, North Carolina, she becomes involved in a mysterious death.

In the bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, a young woman is found dead of a heroin overdose, her baby lying at her side. While this should be an open-and-shut drug case, restraint marks on the victim suggest that the death might not have been completely accidental.

Meet Annabelle Starkey, a shrewd, sweet, and sexy Stephanie Plum-type without the Jersey girl attitude. She’s a one-man kind of girl who loves hats and shoes - and movies. She can’t help but wonder why her own life doesn’t match her favorite silver-screen scenarios. Then one day she meets the charming, slightly mysterious, and definitely magnetic Mickey Paxton and decides it’s time to live one of those Cary Grant films. She accepts Mickey’s invitation to fly to Las Vegas for a holiday and a test flight for romance.

Caterina DeLuca, burned by her run-around now ex-husband, Johnnie Ricco, took the skills she mastered during marriage and opened her own private-eye agency. Now she’s armed with a camera, ready to print the evidence to 8×10 glossies for use in divorce court. The men in her big, whacko family, all Chicago cops and one a crook, aren’t sure what to make of Cat’s career choice.

No fortress can protect against human corruption, not even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. When Dinah Pelerin left sunny Hawaii on an undercover fact-finding mission to the seed vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, she had no idea that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering, that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife, or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms.

Iris Oakley to reconcile with her newly sober husband. But when Rick is found drunk - and dead - in the lion exhibit, grief and anger keep her from questioning the assumptions that surround his death. After a series of other near-fatal "accidents" in her feline section of the zoo, Iris is demoted to bird-keeper, but the danger continues to multiply. Following ambiguous clues and sorting through unlikely motives, Iris begins to understand what really happened to Rick. But to prove it, she'll first have to survive.

Sisters Meg and Sarah Quilliam make sure guests feel right at home when they visit the Inn at Hemlock Falls. Located in upstate New York, Hemlock Falls is a small town renowned for its scenic beauty - and scenes of crime. Disaster strikes a mere week before the Hemlock Falls Ladies’ Auxiliary hosts the annual Spring Fete when the festival’s chairwoman - the redoubtable Adela Henry - gives up her job in a huff. Who’s going to judge the justly renowned Jell-O architecture contest? Who will stop the members of the Craft Guild from sabotaging their rivals, the Crafty Ladies? More to the point, who’s got the tact, diplomacy, and iron will necessary to organize the booths and settle quarrels over the programming? Hemlock’s mayor hopes to assure the fete’s success when he recruits professional organizer Linda Connally and her staff to take over Adela’s duties. But when Connally’s body turns up in the trunk of a used car at Peterson’s Automotive, Meg and Sarah are back in the detecting business.

When cats start getting sick, feline-loving freelance writer Theda Krakow suspects it’s accidental. But Violet, Theda’s shelter-owning rock-music buddy, claims the cats’ kibble was poisoned. When Theda starts looking at politics at the city shelter, she finds a number of people who could have happily committed the heinous crime.

Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.

When an old friend buys a trench coat and opens his own detective agency, PI Cat DeLuca sees a train wreck coming. Everything Billy Bonham knows about being a private eye he learned from Humphrey Bogart. And that’s just enough to make him dangerous. The bungling detective is in way over his head on a case involving murder and a stolen pair of Marilyn Monroe’s dazzling diamond earrings. His outrageous client, Cristina McTigue, is pursued by men who want her dead. Five minutes after meeting the woman, Cat would cheerfully kill her too.

In the weeks before the 1979 Mexican elections, San Diego PI Alvaro Hickey is checking the stories that Baja California campesinos are spreading about visits from the Holy Virgin - an apparition with definite political preferences. Though Alvaro doubts that this visitor is divine, he's firmly on her side. Then, Lourdes Shuler asks him to unite her with her sister, Lupe, whom she claims is the campesinos' Virgin.

Martha "Marty" Nickerson, an assistant district attorney on Cape Cod, speaks for victims of crime and their families and sees the system as a means for doing right. After she wins a murder case, a suspect is put behind bars. But soon another body turns up in disturbingly similar circumstances. Did Marty and her colleagues target the wrong man? Her supervisor refuses to reopen such a high-profile case. But Marty fears that the real killer will strike again.

When P.I. Jade de Jong invites Superintendent David Patel on a scuba diving holiday in St. Lucia, she hopes the time away will rebuild their conflicted relationship. Jade's dreams are soon shattered when David calls off their affair, forcing her into the arms of environmentalist Craig Niewoudt. But the next morning, romantic issues are put aside when a scuba diving instructor, Amanda Bolton, is found brutally stabbed to death.

In the summer of 1880, many people are traveling to the booming health resort of Manitou Springs, Colorado, at the foot of Pike’s Peak, to “chase the cure” for tuberculosis. But Inez Stannert, partowner of the Silver Queen Saloon in Leadville, travels for a different reason to this town renowned for its mineral springs and scenery.

Parrots will repeat anything. They don’t talk sense—or do they? When Pru Marlowe is called in to retrain a foulmouthed African gray after its owner’s death, she can’t help hearing the parrot’s words as a replay of a murder scene. But the doctor on call scoffs at the idea, and the heirs just want their late mother’s pet to stop cursing.