Showing results by author "Connie Shelton" in All Categories

Things are crazy at the bakery, as Sam tries to replicate the magical chocolates that the quirky Romanian chocolatier introduced at Christmas-time. Meanwhile, there are lots of weddings, in addition to her own, and other pastry shop demands during this romantic holiday week. While Sam tries to keep up with it all, another mystery comes her way. Marla Fresques needs to find her missing son. The woman is dying and wants her son home to raise the daughter he left behind.

Now that Samantha Sweet has a contract to provide her special handmade chocolates for the wealthy jet-set clients of Book It Travel, Sweet’s Sweets bakery is taking on a whole new dimension. It’s almost Halloween, and her pastry shop is bursting at the seams. She needs extra employees, but there is no place to put them. Right before the witching day, she comes upon a large Victorian house she can adapt for the business, but the mysterious, spooky noises at night are way more than the normal creaks and groans of an old building. Something else is going on.

It's Christmas and a chocolatier shows up at Sweet's Sweets, offering to create a special line of hand-dipped chocolates for Sam's customers. He says he will work for no pay, just to prove himself. But she learns that he has connections to the wooden box that seems to give Sam her mystical powers, and discovers that certain evil people will do just about anything to take it away from her.

Samantha Sweet breaks into houses for a living - all perfectly legal as a caretaker for the USDA. But her real dream is to open her own pastry shop, 'Sweet's Sweets.' Life is a little crazy for Sam right now. At one of her break-in properties, a dying woman insists that she take a small wooden box. Sam doesn't realize that the old woman was known locally as a 'bruja,' a witch, until she begins to feel some strange effects from the box.

Samantha Sweet's life is a little crazy right now, beginning with her daughter's wedding, which coincides with Sam's receiving a huge new contract for her chocolate factory. The day after the wedding, someone takes a shot at Sam, and she discovers the bad guys are back.  

When a woman walks into Samantha Sweet’s pastry shop, claiming to have amnesia, it’s a puzzle that seems to have nothing to do with Sam’s new commission for a fantastic one-of-a-kind order of chocolates, although "Jane Doe" seems to know a lot about that. Sam calls Sheriff Beau to solve the mystery of who this stranger is and where she belongs. But Beau’s attention is occupied by other things: nearly his entire force is out sick with some kind of flu bug, and now a murder far from Taos requires his full attention. “Jane’s” forgotten memories become vitally important....

Charlie's brother, Ron, is ready for the happiest day of his life when he will marry longtime girlfriend Victoria Morgan. Charlie will be matron of honor, her husband Drake the best man. But when Charlie stops by the bride's house to pick her up for the ceremony, the place is in disarray, and Victoria is missing. And Ron has no proof of where he was the night before, after he and his fiancée had a terrible argument. Was the fight nothing more than pre-wedding jitters, as Ron claims? Or did the unthinkable happen?

For John Carver, a simple Celtic woodworker, life is a struggle to feed his family. Then one summer day, as he walks past a near-dead alder tree, lightning strikes. With the shattered tree lying all around him, Carver pulls himself up and decides to make the best of it - he takes the usable pieces to his workshop. From the shards of that dead tree John creates three boxes. Then the unexplained happens - shortly after handling one of them, John's touch brings his young son back from the brink of death.

Two things are weighing on Samantha Sweet's mind this summer - organizing the Sweet Somethings chocolate festival and tracking down information on the mystical carved wooden box that came into her life nearly two years ago, changing her forever. At last she believes she has located the person who can give the answers.

Samantha Sweet learns that an Irish great-uncle left her an inheritance, so she and Beau change their honeymoon plans and go to the Emerald Isle. Will the gift be something lavish and wonderful? Or is there no pot of gold waiting for Sam? Meanwhile, before Sam fully has the answers to her questions, a new mystery presents itself when a local charter boat is found adrift near the rocky Irish coast, its occupants missing. The family of the captain wants answers and when it looks like a group of Americans might be implicated, the Galway homicide detective in charge of the case enlists Beau’s help.

Samantha Sweet and Beau Cardwell are getting ready for their September wedding, with the whole Sweet clan about to show up for the celebration.

Dealing with her mother may turn out to be the least of Sam’s problems when an unwelcome visitor walks into her pastry shop - Sam’s old heartthrob, the charmer Jake Calendar. Jake wants money for a Hollywood get-rich-quick scheme and he wants Sam to finance the deal. Can Sam convince him that the answer is "no"? Or will he sabotage the plans for her wedding?

Sam is working hard to get her new pastry shop, Sweet's Sweets, open for business. Just when she's really got her hands full with that, she's assigned a new property to take care of as part of her contract with the USDA. The place is a hoarder's delight and Sam is feeling more than a little bit overwhelmed as she begins cleaning with a vengeance. When a blood-soaked garment turns up among some things Sam has dropped off at the thrift shop, Sam recommends that they call the Sheriff's office.

It’s a terrible case of mistaken identity when a gang of bank robbers think that Charlie is a famous movie star. Disappointed with their take from the bank, they decide that a hefty ransom will be their ticket to riches. But what will happen when the real star steps forward? Charlie knows that only her wits will save her from this band of desperate men. Meanwhile, in a race against the clock, Charlie's husband Drake is working with the FBI and local authorities to get Charlie back before her captors realize their mistake.

Charlie is invited to a plush Santa Fe spa, a week-long spiritual/nutrition retreat with her friend Dr. Linda Casper. The massages and spa treatments sound great, until she realizes that there is something darker going on at the mountain resort. Meanwhile, Drake has his own set of concerns. He's been asked to testify as an expert witness in a helicopter crash case and it's causing him more anxiety than any feat of flying ever did. It seems that they are each on their own but their two cases overlap and dangers abound, from all sides.

Charlie and Drake are working a helicopter job in rural Maine when a man approaches and asks for their help. At first glance, it seems he's just an old man who needs to get to his son's remote cabin in the woods. But the cabin holds more secrets than Fergus McNab will admit, and it isn't until Charlie returns to Albuquerque that she discovers they may have just aided and abetted a criminal who has escaped the law back home. The secrets get twistier, the more she looks into the 10-year-old case where Rory McNab, facing a life in prison, seemed to vanish from the reach of the law.

It's a freezing January day when Samantha Sweet finds herself facing the unpleasant task of going back to her old job of breaking into houses. Meanwhile, a customer who's just a little bit too nice seems to be worming her way into Jen's confidence. Sheriff Beau, on the other hand, is dealing with a car-crash-turned-murder, and somehow it all seems to tie together in a great big sticky situation. 

A nearly flawless museum robbery, a missing million-dollar necklace, a stalled investigation. For the victim of the crime, the situation calls for desperate measures, and spunky 72-year-old Pen Fitzpatrick isn't going to sit by and do nothing. When the police have a dozen excuses why they can’t solve the crime, Pen does the only thing she can do - gather a group of friends to help catch the crooks and steal back the necklace. They call themselves The Heist Ladies. 

Charlie Parker and her husband Drake Langston accept a job with Gold Trail Adventures in Skagway, Alaska, flying visitors by helicopter to remote cabin sites to experience the outdoor lifestyle and seek their fortunes. It isn't long before one of the guests finds a set of bones in an old mine, remains that date back decades.

It's Christmas in Albuquerque; Charlie and family are ready for a quiet holiday at home. But right away, her hopes fade when Charlie's brother and PI business partner, Ron, brings in two new cases, one of which made national headlines. Five years earlier, with the tide of media attention and public sentiment against her, Tali Donovan was acquitted of killing her two children and went into hiding. Now, on the anniversary of the children's disappearance, their father wants answers.

Revenge is often a cold dish, but in the tiny northern New Mexico town of Sembramos emotions are running decidedly hot. When two men convicted of murdering a local girl are released from prison after serving only a few years, their convictions overturned, the town's old pain rises to the surface and tempers flare. Samantha Sweet has her hands full with Easter at Sweet's Sweets, while her husband, Taos County Sheriff Beau Cardwell, is charged with keeping order among the two hundred residents of Sembramos.