Cozy Suspense

It has only been a few months since Sarah Kelling's elderly husband passed away, and she is struggling to adapt to life as a penniless young widow. To make ends meet, she converts her stately Boston home into a boardinghouse, a decision that brings something even better than money: the company of art-fraud-investigator Max Bittersohn. The budding couple is standing on a balcony, recovering from a second-rate concert at a third-rate museum, when something plummets past them. The museum has been robbed, and a guard has fallen to his death.

This Yuletide season, there's no time for Angie Curtis and Patrick West to linger under the mistletoe. Patrick's being needled by his mother - movie star Skye West - to set the stage for a perfect white Christmas as she brings her costar, screenwriters, and director home for the holidays. With his mother's long list of wishes, Patrick's becoming unraveled. To help, the Mainely Needlepointers offer to decorate Skye's Victorian mansion and create needlepoint pillows as gifts for the guests.

Before she started hosting dinners for Indiana University's Sociology Department, Robbie never imagined scholarly meetings could be so hostile. It's all due to Professor Charles Stilton, who seems to thrive on heated exchanges with his peers and underlings, and tensions flare one night after he disrespects Robbie's friend, graduate student Lou. So when Robbie and Lou go snowshoeing the next morning and find the contentious academic frozen under ice, police suspect that Lou might have killed him after their public tiff.

The Tail Waggin' Winterfest is the highlight of the season in the famously pet-friendly Pocono Mountains town of Sylvan Creek. But despite attractions like an ice sculpture display, a dogsled race, and gourmet hot chocolate, Daphne Templeton finds herself annoyed by TV producer Lauren Savidge, who's filming the festivities. She's critical, controlling, and as chilly as the January air. Daphne would like to tell her to go jump in a lake - and as a matter of fact, that's exactly what they're both going to do....

Between her cheating husband and her on-air meltdown, Marzie Nowak is going through a bit of a bad spell and a heck of a midlife crisis. Her kids have flown the coop to college, and her husband has opted to trade her in for a younger model. With nowhere else to turn, the ex-big-city journalist crawls back to her superstitious hometown of Widow's Bay just in time for their annual pagan festival. Her new, much less glamorous gig has her reporting for a local news website.

Richard is a middle-aged Englishman who runs a B&B in the fictional Val de Follet in the Loire Valley. Nothing ever happens to Richard, and really that’s the way he likes it. One day, however, one of his older guests disappears, leaving behind a bloody handprint on the wallpaper. Another guest, the exotic Valérie, persuades a reluctant Richard to join her in investigating the disappearance. Richard remains a dazed passenger in the case until things become really serious and someone murders Ava Gardner, one of his beloved hen...and you don’t mess with a fellow’s hens!

Courtney Cain’s life is turned upside down when she loses her job at a prestigious ad agency and she’s ready for a change. When she finds an opening at the Curly Bay Pet Hotel and Rescue, it seems like the perfect fit. Her pet-loving antics soon uncover all sorts of small-town cozy murders and mysteries.

Cooper Lee is at a crossroads. Her boyfriend of five years just left her for another woman, she's living in an apartment above her parents' garage, and her job as a copier repairperson is feeling a little, well, repetitious. Hoping for a fresh start and a new outlook on life, she joins the Bible study group at Hope Street Church. The last thing she expects while studying the Bible is a lesson in murder.

Angie Curtis and the Mainely Needlepointers are all too familiar with the Gardener estate. The crumbling Victorian mansion, known as Aurora, has been sitting vacant for nearly 25 years - and some say that it's haunted by the ghost of Jasmine Gardener, the teenage girl who died there in 1970 under mysterious circumstances. Harbor Haven is abuzz with excitement when Hollywood actress Skye West decides to buy Aurora and sell off its furnishings.

St. Pete Beach is getting weird. Between warlocks, shark shifters, and wolf packs going to war, Hali Waverly and Gray Hunter have their hands full. Things get even worse when shifters with ties to Gray’s pack start attacking people on the beach. What’s even weirder is that when the duo step in during a frothing melee, the shifters drop dead before they can be questioned.

Several weeks ago, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf. But their relief is short-lived. In a sickening turn of events, Gamache has realized that plot, as horrific as it was, was just the beginning. Perhaps even a deliberate misdirection. One he fell into. Something deeper and darker, more damaging, is planned. Did he in fact arrest the Black Wolf, or are they still out there?

Daisy McCrae's life is in tatters. She's lost her job, broken up with her boyfriend, and has been reduced to living in the attic above her family's store, the Union Street Bakery, while learning the business. Making things worse is the constant feeling of not being a "real" McCrae, since she was adopted as a child and has a less-than-perfect relationship with her two sisters. Then a long-standing elderly customer passes away, and for some reason she bequeaths to Daisy a journal dating back to the 1850s...

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together, they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Alchemist Zoe Faust and her impish gargoyle sidekick Dorian Robert-Houdin travel to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to investigate a mysterious discovery found in the wreckage of the tragic fire: a long-lost gargoyle illustration drawn by Victor Hugo himself. When the work of art is stolen under impossible circumstances, Dorian must use his “little gray cells” — not to mention his culinary skills — to solve the crime and discover the true origins of where he came from.

The Birches was one of the grand mansions of the 1920s, with a ballroom, tennis courts, and, of course, a swimming pool. But after the crash of '29, when Lois and Judith's father killed himself to escape his debts, the family turned the summer home into a fulltime retreat from the world. Decades later, Judith is the queen of New York society, a fast-living beauty whose nerves are beginning to fray, while Lois still lives in the dilapidated old mansion, writing mystery novels to pay the bills. She is about to encounter a mystery of her own.

Nothing heats up Old Town quite like the annual Pie Festival, and this year is no exception, especially since Sophie's professional rival, Natasha Smith, is barred from participating. Sophie, meanwhile, has been asked to oversee the pie eating contest. But the drama really rolls out when celebrity judge, Patsy Lee Presley, host of television's most popular cooking show, bites the crust during the competition, and Sophie's friends are suspected of the crime. As the folks of Old Town dish, the tough truth about Patsy's meteoric rise to domestic stardom begins to leak.

Newly divorced Alison Kerby wants a second chance for herself and her nine-year-old daughter. She's returned to her hometown on the Jersey Shore to transform a Victorian fixer-upper into a charming-and profitable guest house. One small problem: the house is haunted, and the two ghosts insist Alison must find out who killed them.

A grieving young widow, Charlene needed a new start - so she bought a historic mansion, sight unseen, and drove from Chicago to New England to start turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. On her first night in the house, she awakens to find a handsome man with startling blue eyes in her bedroom. Terror turns to utter disbelief when he politely introduces himself as Jack Strathmore - and explains that he used to live here - when he was alive. He firmly believes that someone pushed him down the stairs three years ago, and he won't be able to leave until someone figures out who.

When Clint Marlow's partner in crime is found murdered in the basement of Marlow House, Clint is the likely suspect. The only problem: Clint is dead. But that doesn't matter to the FBI agents investigating the case. Clint looks alive to them.

After 15 years away, Kate Hamilton never expected to end up back in her hometown of Asheboro, Maryland, full time. And she definitely didn't expect to be leading the charge of recreating the town as a Victorian village and tourist attraction. The Barton mansion, meant to be the centerpiece of the Victorian village, has proven to be a veritable goldmine of documents about the town's 19th-century history, and Kate is convinced the papers hide something of value. Then a dead body turns up in the town library - mere hours before the documents were meant to arrive there themselves.