Animal Mysteries

Mayor Cora Mae Bingham has a new friend that has come to town to straighten up the coal mine’s failed finances and keep the paychecks flowing faithfully through the holiday, but his financial fixes may cause some unanticipated fallout. Canine Officer Briscoe helps find a missing photographer, but the developments turn dark when the police probe into her marriage. Only the dark room offers some light on the situation. Despite these concerns, the citizens of Spicetown have a full heart at Christmastime and are busy preparing for the community play and choral presentation.

Marie Fortune, 39, a successful dog groomer in Boston, has had enough of catering to the wealthy and their pampered dogs. Realizing it is time to make a change, she quits and heads to a small coastal town in Maine, where she remembers fond summers as a kid. Marie expects to go for a brief getaway - and is shocked to learn that her great-aunt left her an inheritance: a dilapidated, historic house high up on a hill overlooking the harbor.

Former stand-up comic Juno Mulligan has been suffering a serious sense-of-humour failure. Not only has she lost the love of her life, but she’s having to relocate to the (admittedly idyllic) village of Inkbury to watch out for her elderly mother, who she’s genuinely worried might be marrying a wife-killer. She hopes that her old friend, disgraced-journalist-turned-novelist Phoebe Fredericks can help her crack the case of whether her mother’s perma-tanned, iceberg-smiled, three-times-a-widower fiancé is hiding a murderous past.

It’s been nine months since widowed mom Bella Jordan and her young son, Max, moved to Lily Dale, the quirky, close-knit New York community populated by people who can speak to the dead...if one believes in that kind of thing. Now she counts Valley View, the guesthouse she runs, as home and her psychic medium neighbors as friends - even haughty British Pandora, who used to own Valley View before her difficult divorce. So when Pandora sweeps in, requesting an urgent tête-à-tête, Bella expects it to be another complaint about book club. It isn’t.

Ra the Mighty is Pharaoh's Cat, Lord of the Powerful Paw. He is not Ra the Royal Babysitter. How's a cat supposed to fit in all his snacks and naps when his charges keep getting into mischief? Ra's new job only gets harder on a voyage up the Nile, leading to a fearsome palace where crocodiles swarm the waters. Then Pharaoh's son disappears. Has he run away? Has he been eaten by crocodiles? Has he been kidnapped, or worse? Ra and his fellow Great Detectives, Khepri and Miu, set out to discover the truth, but the palace is home to many secrets.

When a mysterious stranger turns up making claims that threaten Lady Fowling’s legacy, Hayley Burke must dig deep into her late-benefactor’s history to uncover the truth and catch a conniving killer in this new mystery from USA Today best-selling author Marty Wingate.

It's summertime in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and Bertie James' college class is having their 40th-anniversary reunion. The opening-night reception is held at the Lighthouse Library, and Lucy and her colleagues have assembled an exhibit of library artifacts showing how libraries have changed over the years. After the reception, some of the women take a walk down the boardwalk to the pier, using flashlights to illuminate the dark path, but what's scarier than the dark is finding the former director of the Lighthouse Library floating lifeless in the water.

“Sharks are as timid as rabbits,” says a superintendent of the Coast Guard, dismissing the possibility that a shark could be the culprit in an unprecedented fatal attack at the Jersey Shore. It’s July, and swimming in the sea is a popular new pastime, but people up and down the East Coast are shocked and mystified by the swimmer’s death. A prominent surgeon at the shore, Dr. Edwin Halsey is the one who examines the victim, and the only one who believes the perpetrator was a shark—and that it will strike again.

When Sally May and Loper head out of town for a wedding, Hank the Cowdog, Head of Ranch Security, knows it's up to him to keep things under control. After subjecting strawberry ice cream to rigorous product testing, test-driving a mysterious spaceship, and thwarting a sneak attack from a couch monster, Hank faces the fight of his life.

The problem with notoriety is unfair expectations. When Mack’s mother Millicent Moreau requests Doreen’s help with a small problem she’s kept hidden for decades, Doreen feels obligated to help. And what harm could it do, after all? Worst-case scenario? It’ll annoy Mack, but that’s something she does on a regular basis, anyway.

The group discovers a purebred Maltese whimpering in the snow-covered grove - right beside a dead body. Pete, a squatter who camped out on the land, apparently met his end after a fallen fir-tree branch fell on his head. But as Melanie and Aunt Peg investigate Pete's complicated history, it's clear his death was no accident. Now, Melanie must run through a flurry of likely suspects and muzzle a dogged murderer in time - or she'll be next on someone's deadly list.

Maddie is hoping to have some downtime during Daybreak Island's off-season to tackle her to-do list. Her grandfather's house-turned-cat-cafe is under construction, and she's also scoping out places to open a juice bar on the island. On top of that, her relationship with adorable dog groomer Lucas has taken a pawsitive turn. But easy is getting harder every day for Maddie, especially when a big-name writer who's on the island working on a new project winds up floating in the canal.

Each day of Advent, a different animal shows children its own amazing way to meet the dark and cold. Wood Frog freezes into a frog-shaped cube of ice! For six months, Painted Turtle doesn’t breathe! Woodchuck can’t be wakened, even if shaken! With each creature, children hear the refrain: The dark is not an end. It’s a door. It’s the way a new beginning comes.

Blessed (or cursed, depending on who you ask) with human intelligence, Sir Edgar Allan Kipling, magical talking cat extraordinaire, spends most of his time keeping his human wizard out of trouble—whether she wants him to or not. If she knew what he usually got up to, she would protest most vociferously. But sometimes a cat’s gotta do what a cat’s gotta do, and one can watch only so many soap operas before an offer of mischief and adventure is too good to turn down.

These are the adventures and discoveries of the scientists who revealed the secrets of the Komodo dragon. This strange creature inspired myth and legend, luring brave souls into the forests of Indonesia to see if the tales were true. In the end, it attracted scientists, who unraveled the mysteries of how such a remarkable creature could exist, how it uses the deadly germs in its saliva to its advantage, and how those microbes may lead to cures for stubborn diseases.

Emma Reed and her beloved Corgi move from London to Cornwall with the dream of opening a tea shop - but first, they'll have to collar a criminal in the first book in a charming new series.

Thirty-nine-year-old Rosi Laruee—named Rosisophia Doroche after her mother’s beloved Golden Girls—decides that the end of her twenty-year marriage and her dad’s impending knee replacement surgery are all the excuses she needs to visit Tucson Valley Retirement Community. But the drama follows Rosi when she finds the body of local tart and business owner, Salem Mansfield. The information she discovers using her newspaper reporter sleuthing skills coupled with the clues she picks up from lackluster Police Officer Dan Daniel lead to a surprise discovery when the murderer is revealed.

Gwinny Tuffel, the dog sitter, stays at an ageing rock singer's Little Venice houseboat to look after his border collie while he goes on tour. But during the annual Canal Carnival the singer's body is discovered, having never made it out of London. The police dismiss it as an accident, but Gwinny suspects murder most foul. It is up to her to solve this curious crime .

The Tour de Cascade is the brainchild of Charming Books proprietor Violet Waverly's Grandma Daisy. But not everyone in this Niagara Region village supports the race. As if the bike race weren't tiring enough, pesky private investigator Joel Redding is snooping around Charming Books. When Redding perishes in an accident during the race, David discovers that the brake line of the private eye's bike was cut. Worse, Violet tops his list of suspects. As Emerson the tuxedo cat and resident crow Faulkner look on, Charming Books steers Violet to the works of Walt Whitman to solve the crime.

Dogleg Island Police Chief Aggie Malone has spent years searching for the identity of her birth father. Now, thanks to a home DNA test, she has a lead...but it’s taking her in a direction she never could have imagined, and desperately does not want to go. Because the evidence suggests that Aggie could be the daughter of the infamous Angelo, head of the deadly Ghost Syndicate crime empire. Matters become more complicated when Aggie’s canine partner, Flash, discovers an abandoned child on the beach.