China Bayles

Best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert is especially beloved for creating herbalist and ex-lawyer China Bayles, hailed by Publishers Weekly as “in a class with lady sleuths V.I. Warshawski and Stephanie Plum.” In Widow’s Tears, China has urgent business to discuss with Ruby, a friend gifted with extrasensory perception. Meeting Ruby at a supposedly haunted house, China soon uncovers a mystery that may be linked to a deadly robbery that very night.

When China's and Ruby's friend Karen Prior is mugged in a mall parking lot and dies a few days later, China begins to suspect that her friend's death was not a random assault. Karen was a filmmaker supervising a student documentary about the fifteen-year-old murder of a woman named Christine Morris and the acquittal of the man accused of the crime. Is it possible that the same person who killed Christine Morris targeted Karen?

For more than 20 years, Susan Wittig Albert has been delivering "some of the best-plotted mysteries on the market" ( Houston Chronicle). In Bittersweet, China is hoping to spend a peaceful Thanksgiving in Pecan Springs. But the holiday turns treacherous after a deadly accident. And when a local vet is shot, China and game warden Mack Chambers suspect a connection to fawns stolen from a nearby ranch.

It's mid-April in Pecan Springs, and China is renting her guest cottage to Kelly Kaufman, who needs a temporary place to live as she contends with a very acrimonious divorce from her husband, Rich. One nasty point of dispute is her part ownership of the Comanche Creek Brewing Company, which she is refusing to sell. At the same time, as a nurse employed by a local hospice, Kelly has discovered instances of suspicious practices.

In the exciting new mystery from the New York Times best-selling author, China Bayles fears for her husband's life as an escaped convict targets him. A killer McQuaid put away years ago has busted out of Huntsville Prison and appears to be headed for Pecan Springs. China wants to stay by her husband's side and keep him from harm, but McQuaid insists that she get out of town and go to the Last Chance Olive Ranch, where she's agreed to teach a workshop on herbs.

While helping Ruby Wilcox clean up the loft above their shops, China comes upon a box of antique handcrafted lace and old photographs. Following the discovery, she hears a woman humming an old Scottish ballad and smells the delicate scent of lavender.... Soon, strange happenings start to occur in Thyme and Seasons: misplaced items, a ringing bell, and the appearance of lavender sprigs in odd places. When a customer mentions seeing a mysterious woman picking flowers nearby and then suddenly disappearing, China must finally admit what Ruby has always known - their building is haunted. But by whom?

China and Ruby Wilcox are presenting their annual ''Not Just Plain Vanilla Workshop", always a huge hit with customers at Thyme & Seasons Herb Shop. But someone involved with the workshop is driven by a deadly motive, and China soon finds herself teaming up with the very pregnant Pecan Springs police chief Sheila Dawson to solve a vanilla-flavored murder.

Herbalist China Bayles' latest adventure takes her to the mountains of North Carolina, where her friend Dorothea Harper serves as the director and curator of the Hemlock House Library, a priceless collection of rare gardening books housed in a haunted mountainside mansion that once belonged to Sunny Carswell, a reclusive heiress. But the most valuable book - A Curious Herbal, created by Elizabeth Blackwell in the 1730s - is missing, and Dorothea is under suspicion.

Olivia Andrews is locally famous for her blog and podcast, Forget Me Not: A Crime Victim’s Storyboard, which is dedicated to telling the stories of victims of crime. Now she has a stunning story to tell about a decades-old murder mystery involving a prominent citizen of Pecan Springs—someone who isn’t the man everybody thinks he is. But she is killed by a hit-and-run driver while she’s out jogging early one morning. Was it an accident—or something else? Her sister wants to know.