Showing results by author "Ellen Hart" in All Categories

Jane Lawless has a knack for cooking and a talent for detection. A case gone bad has left her with a serious head injury and vulnerable enough to accept help from former lover Dr. Julia Martinsen. The TLC is welcome, if only Jane didn’t suspect the jittery Julia of hiding something. Disquieted, Jane’s check into the doctor’s past turns up chilling details. Then a shocking death and swirling danger disrupt what’s left of Jane’s recovery, and being in love with Julia doesn’t protect either of them from a killer out for more blood.

After 75 years of high-minded respectability, the Amelia Gower Women's Club is in trouble. One distinguished director has been strangled. Another has taken a fatal plunge down the club's elegant staircase.

As soon as restaurateur-sleuth Jane Lawless begins investigating these murders, wheels within wheels start to turn, meshing private lives with the club's inner workings. Even Jane's new lover, Dorrie, is somehow involved in the diabolical proceedings....

Aging theater actor Torald Werness' last curtain call is as a corpse. Murdered after his last performance in his last theatrical production, Minneapolis restaurateur-sleuth Jane Lawless finds his body onstage, impaled on a part of the set. Before long, a series of coincidences places Jane in the role of prime suspect. Determined to clear her name, Jane turns to her best friend, Cordelia, for help. Together, their intuition leads them to the dead man's family, a glamorous - and appropriately melodramatic - Midwestern theatrical dynasty. Jane and Cordelia must separate the theatrics from reality before Jane takes the blame for someone else's crime.

After years spent mourning the death of her partner, Christine Kane, Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless thinks she's ready to move on. That is, until she finds a gun among Christine's belongings. The night before Christine died of cancer, three members of the Simoneau family, Christine's real estate clients, were murdered. The timing of their deaths appeared coincidental and Jane always assumed Christine knew nothing of the family's secrets. But as she searches for clues to understand what really happened all those many years ago, the gun and a few other discoveries begin to convince Jane otherwise.

The first of the dead is wealthy Belle Dumont, who vanished from her home in the Minnesota woods only hours before she was to reveal startling news to her three grown children. The kids and Belle's lover deny any knowledge of this mysterious bombshell, but amateur sleuth Jane Lawless, Belle's old friend, suspects these charming folk of being less than forthright. In fact, Jane suspects coldhearted murder....

Minneapolis restaurateur and amateur sleuth Jane Lawless is in the middle of ringing in the New Year the best way she knows how - with her family, friends, and some excellent champagne - when the biggest financial backers in Minnesota politics break up the party with a little backroom proposition for her father: How'd he like to be the state's next governor? Flattered, Ray Lawless, a retired defense attorney, agrees to run, and the latecomer's sprint to the state capital is going great until reporters and opponents start digging up the kind of dirt that is more valuable than gold out on the campaign trail.

Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless is at crossroads. Unsure of what to do next, she takes her good friend A. J. Nolan up on his standing offer: To take her on as a private investigator. Her first job seems simple enough. All she had to do is find Annie Archer’s stepfather. While she’s happy to close her first case, she finds it hard to reconcile the difference between PI work - finding what people pay you to find - and uncovering the truth, the whole truth, especially when clues in this seemingly simple case point to more threatening family secrets.