Showing results by author "Margaret Lashley" in All Categories

Doreen Diller wants to be a movie star. But after 15 years of failed auditions, she’s yet to garner a single callback from a Hollywood producer. Determined to hit the big time before she turns 40, she pins her hopes on a job assisting soap opera heartthrob Tad Longmire. He could be the answer to her dreams—or the beginning of her nightmares. While filming a new TV series starring Tad, a stabbing death rocks the set. Unfortunately for Doreen, the role of murder suspect is finally one she appears ideally suited to play.

Most start-up businesses fail within five years. But with Geraldine Jiggles as her new partner, Val’s smashing new concept for “retail therapy” might not last five minutes. Has Val signed a pact with the she-devil herself? Maybe ... Just exactly who is that sharp-tongued demon in polyester pantaloons, anyway? When Val starts investigating Geraldine’s past, what she discovers threatens to tear a hole the very fabric of reality itself—or at list rip it one heck of a new unseemly seam.

After being duped out of her life savings in Germany, Val Fremden retreats home to Florida with more than just her pride in tatters. Broke, jobless, divorced, and forty-five, she knows starting over won’t be easy. But when her only friend suddenly turns up dead, Val begins to wonder if the world is out to get her.

Growing up in backwoods Florida, Bobbie Drex has seen it all – from two-headed turtles to two-timing boyfriends. Her life of hard knocks has left her short on cash, but she’s still packing enough snark to give any whack-job a run for his money. Or so she thinks. But when a mysterious stranger arrives at her mechanic shop seeking repairs to his rundown RV, suddenly it’s Bobbie who’s in for a complete overhaul... Norman Bates in a turban. Gonadal twins. Mothman pooper-scoopers.

All Bobbie Drex wanted was something normal—a new career as a private investigator. But after signing up with Nick Grayson to complete her internship, nothing normal has happened since. In fact, when Grayson gets a call about a possible alien invasion going down in Plant City, Florida, normal packs its bags and books a flight for another planet. Man pudding. Doomsday preppers. Wayne’s World wannabes …. Not to mention the whole “living-with-a-stranger-in-an-RV” thing. The horrors!

Val’s always been unlucky at love—and a whole bunch of other things. But she’s never actually felt cursed. Until now. When Tom gives Val an engagement ring for her 50th birthday, she wants to fly the coop. But it’s Tom who skips out on the romantic getaway he planned. When he can’t make the trip, one of Val’s pals goes instead. On the first day, her friend entangles Val in a prank that ticks off the wrong tourist. On the second day, she gets Val charged with murder. Did I mention Val was unlucky?

Val Fremden is a lot of things. Quirky. Jaded. Disaster-prone—to name a few. But more than anything, she’s afraid of commitment. So it's no wonder that when boyfriend Tom tells her he loves her, Val plays it cool. But when he accidently hauls her mom’s ashes to a junkyard, Val loses it like Chernobyl 2.0. On the warpath with Tom, Val turns to her wacko, low-rent friends to help track down her mom’s cremains. But three botched stakeouts and two disasters later, she still hasn't got peanuts.

Val knows she can’t solve all the world’s problems, so she’s settled on two: smashing every tacky figurine on the planet…and ridding the universe of her boyfriend’s hideous vinyl recliner.

It’s moving day for Val. And, as usual, anything that can go wrong does - beginning with her new boyfriend, Tom. When he shows up at her doorstep with an unwelcome delivery, Val becomes the unwitting center of attention for a whole new world of weirdos…whose antics could pin Val for human dismemberment. Plagued with a hot cop on her tail and a mean one on her trail, Val is forced to turn to old friends and new ones in her attempt to point the finger of blame on somebody else. But when an unexpected witness identifies Val as the guilty party, it may be time for her to skip town.

All Doreen Diller wanted was to be an A-List movie star. But after finding out her family in Florida is related to the mob, she may have to settle for Plan B—a hasty exit, stage right. Sophia, the reigning Godmother, is about to turn one hundred. But someone is determined to end her centennial celebration with a bang and grab the throne for themselves.

We’ve all dreamed of ditching everything and running off to another country—but almost no one actually ever does. Well, Val feels like she's almost no one. Invisible to her husband and dissatisfied with her life, deep in her soul Val yearns to be someone else. Someone sexy. Someone happy. So she buys a ticket and takes off to Italy, with only her favorite romance novel to guide her.

Doreen’s acting career was in the dumpster—until she played a serial killer on TV. Now she can’t seem to live the infamy down. It’s not helping that her Aunt Edna is a member of the Southern mafia. Or that the gang of elderly ladies at Edna’s apartment complex consider Doreen their rising new star.

All Val Fremden wanted was a quiet holiday away from her oddball family. But that just ain’t gonna happen. When Val and her boyfriend arrive at her mother’s “country estate” in Hicksville, Florida, the annual family fruitcake competition is well underway. And there’s more than a few fruits and nuts in the running.

When Bobbie and Grayson head back to Plant City to help out some old friends, they run into a “hole” new set of problems. While investigating a rash of missing persons, it’s not long before they get under each other’s skin. What’s making them all hot and bothered? Each other. In more ways than one. Bobbie’s down-to-earth explanations for the missing men irritate Grayson, while his otherworldly theories have her itching for a sane solution. But when new, conflicting evidence emerges in the case, they soon realize they’ve only scratched the surface of the mystery at hand.

When Grayson and Bobbie head to the Florida Panhandle to witness a spectacle of nature, they take a wrong turn and quickly find themselves up to their armpits in arthropods. And that’s the good part of their vacation. Campers are disappearing without a trace from nearby Torreya State Park. Whatever’s stalking them soon sets its eyes on Bobbie and Grayson, too.

When Bobbie and Grayson go on the hunt for the legendary Florida Skunk Ape, there’s more than one tangled mystery afoot. Grayson, the man Bobbie’s hung her life and career on, is every bit as evasive as the creature they’re tracking. At the start of their investigation, a colossally bad judgement call leaves Bobbie wondering just exactly who—or what—the elusive being is.

After 50 years of bumbling around on the planet, Val Fremden’s got nothing to show for her life but a long string of dead-end jobs and a two-digit bank balance. But just as she’s about to toss her champagne dreams and caviar wishes into the dumpster, Val discovers that Marco Shamway—the jerk who plagued her all through high school—is now a millionaire. Worse yet, the idea that catapulted Marco to fame and fortune was one he’d stolen … from her!

What better place than the Sunshine State for dark souls to live out their golden years? After all, who would notice? Uh, Bobbie and Grayson, of course. As a rogue physicist turned conspiracy chaser, Grayson's motto is: Have sentience, will travel. As a broke, private-eye wannabe, Bobbie doesn't have much choice but to follow his sketchy command. But every road Grayson travels down leads to the bizarre, the unexplained, and taco-induced heartburn. Vampires. Zombiguanas. Ikigai smell. Its hard to decide which is scarier!

When Val’s forced to take up dog-sitting as a second career, she runs into one tiny snag. She’s afraid of dogs. In fact, the only thing she’s more afraid of is Tom moving in and wrecking her Sweatpants Saturdays. With neighbor Laverne facing the same impending doom, the two women decide sabotage is the perfect solution to change the plans of their cohabitation-minded boyfriends. But their scheme soon gets sidetracked when a swarthy guy with a shady past moves in next door and neighborhood dogs start disappearing.

Planning for a rainy day has never been Val’s forte. But when a storm brews up right in her own backyard, Val’s forced to get off her lounge chair and spring into action. A shady, ham-fisted developer’s threatening to knock down Val’s favorite beach haunt, along with all the precious memories held within its shabby walls. With the owner’s signature on the bill of sale, the plan seems like a done deal. Or is it? Something fishy is going on at the beach, and it’s going to take all the wits Val can muster to put a pig-headed developer out to pasture.