Crime Mystery

Maui is sacred places, ancient artifacts, and the dark lava of deepest passions.

Nothing ever goes easy for detectives Lei Texeira and Michael Stevens. An investigation into heiau desecrations must take a backseat to the emergence of an enemy who targets those closest to them, leaving shrouds as a calling card. Lei and Stevens face challenges of the body, mind, and heart in this seventh in the best-selling Lei Crime Series.

A child’s skull, washed up on a beach, calls out for justice. The last thing detective Lei Texeira wants to do while her husband is deployed overseas is deal with a cold case involving child homicide, and rescuing a group of foster kids takes her beyond her personal limits. Meanwhile, Michael Stevens lands in a jungle hell filled with every kind of threat from crocodiles to kidnappers.

Someone is attacking and robbing luxury yachts as they sail the Hawaiian Islands leaving their passengers missing and presumed dead. Sergeant Lei Texeira, with her typical leap first look later style, dives into a case with the Coast Guard to find answers that lie as deep as Davy Jones’ locker.

When a call from his daughter, Katie, interrupts his much-needed vacation, Detective Wade Jackson knows it’s bad news. His ex-wife, Renee, has disappeared and Jackson heads home to discover she’s been kidnapped. That same weekend, a young University of Oregon student is brutally beaten and dumped naked at the ER. As Jackson teams with FBI Agent Carla River to retrace Renee’s movements and handle a high-tech, fast-moving ransom demand, Detective Lara Evans must identify the young assault victim, then track down the assailant with no leads to go on…except the whispered rumor of a secret sorority.

Carlisle Homicide Detective Erin McCoy battles the jitters as the first woman in homicide partnered with Senior Detective Christopher Snow. On their first case, they track a serial killer who's stalking family members embroiled in an inheritance dispute. The perp dispatches his victims with toxic chemicals. As the detectives chase clues and connect the related victims, their mutual attraction blooms while she nurses him after a shooting incident. But sparks fly when FBI Special Agent Howard offers McCoy a job if she'll train at Quantico.

With the possible exception of the expatriate writers living in Paris in the 1920s, no single group of American literary figures has achieved as much fame or notoriety as the New York sophisticates who met to match wits and attempt to outshine each other as members of what came to be called the Algonquin Round Table. The humorists Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman, playwrights Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, novelists Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott, and most famously, Dorothy Parker, were the literary luminaries who made up this group....

When Broker Assistant Kathy Jenkins overhears a suspicious conversation between her boss and an unknown person, she's thrust into a dangerous situation, leading to her wrongful termination. Hiring Scott Winslow, Kathy aims to expose the wrongdoing, while Lee Henry's unconventional investigation uncovers a network of seasoned brokers dealing in non-public information without a paper trail.

Windy Corner is being remodeled into a writers' retreat. Two of the young workers, Jake and Roman, are showing too much of the wrong kind of interest in Katie, Emily's young single-mother housekeeper. It's a stormy autumn and Emily is reading Wuthering Heights. Roman, a dark and brooding type, reminds her of Heathcliff. At a Halloween murder mystery fundraiser at Windy Corner, someone is found stabbed to death. Windy Corner's very own detective, Luke, is reluctantly forced to investigate Katie.

All that serenity was broken by human behavior gone off the rails. Philanthropist Marilyn Boggs, is murdered on her private island near Naples. Though irresponsible and spoiled, Marilyn was a pillar of the community. Who'd want her dead? There's a huge difference between fear and being afraid and the suspects in this murder feared their existence was in jeopardy. Det. Luca instincts point to the husband whose motives are clear but inconveniently, other, credible suspects surface. Full of betrayal, tension, and suspense, Det. Luca is back in another hard-boiled mystery.

Michael Stevens investigates the murder of a chef in a fine dining restaurant on Maui that's a buffet of possible motives where jealousy, passion, and revenge top the menu. A host of familiar characters, from Jared Stevens to Dr. Wilson, chime in from their perspectives, each contributing essential information to one of the most complex cases Stevens has ever encountered.... Nothing ever goes as planned for Lei and Stevens, and that includes the arrival of their first child. Lei is fully occupied with this personal project as her world is torn apart by powerful forces.

Five years after the events of Rip Tides, Lei Texeira gets into hot water investigating a crime scene 90 feet down off of the tiny atoll of Molokini, where the death of a beautiful marine biologist is anything but an accident. Lei’s husband, Michael Stevens, is desperate to kill an enemy from within, and it drives him to make a choice his wife will never sanction. Can Lei and Stevens find the answers they need before their different directions tear them apart?

While catering a gala for the Cruz Museum, Nora Charles agrees to look into the disappearance of director Violet Crenshaw's niece, a case previously undertaken by her frisky feline friend Nick's former owner, a private eye whose whereabouts are also currently unknown. As Nora and her curious cat Nick pull at the string of clues, they begin to unravel a twisted tale of coded messages, theft, false identities, murder, and international espionage.

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

Female FBI Agent Charlie Glass is assigned to recover treasures stolen from the Baghdad Museum during the Iraq War. The suspense explodes when she uncovers an international crime syndicate within her own team. Mysterious murders and bitter betrayals plunge Charlie into a deadly fight for survival.

Poised to win the prestigious Triple Crown of Surfing, Maui surf star Makoa Simmons washes up tragically dead. Detective Lei Texeira plunges into a high-profile case whose dark and tangled motives reach deep into the elite world of professional surfing on the North Shore of Oahu. Lei must follow her instincts into new territory even as husband Michael Stevens struggles with heartbreak of another kind.

Hawaii is cane fires, lush jungles, and feuds that won't die until everyone's dead. Detective Lei Texeira stalks the shroud killer on her own terms as Michael Stevens finds himself engulfed in the flames of a case with tangled consequences. In this eighth of the best-selling Lei Crime Series, Lei and Stevens find out just how far hate and love will go.

Maui is lush mountains, cloud forest and exquisite birdsong - but for Detective Lei Texeira, arrows break that peace. Someone is stalking poachers that are capturing Maui's rarest birds, and Lei pursues the case with her usual leap-first, look-later style - but will she be able to catch a killer, save the birds, and still make it to her own wedding? Shattered Palms is a roller coaster ride from the top of Haleakala to the beach and back again, with extinction at stake.

Things are finally growing smoothly on the Finn Family Farm. With the help of caretakers Joe and Alice Wong and farmer Samuel Brown, Charlotte Finn is starting to feel at home at the Santa Barbara County produce farm she inherited. But all is not strawberries and cream: A blight is destroying young berry plants. Worse, another mysterious death is shaking Little Acorn.

It's early October - time for the Fall Folk Art Festival and Bake Sale in Lilyvale, Arkansas. Every business along the town square will benefit from the event, including the craft store run by Leslee Stanton Nix - a.k.a. Nixy - and the Silver Six, a group of retirees. In charge of making the festival go smoothly, Nixy is confident that it will be a success.