Reading House

Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to this year's Dixie Book Festival. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full. What Annie doesn't count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, better known as "Henrie O", has experienced much sadness and loss in her life - yet nothing more tragic than the sudden death six years ago of her husband, Richard, on Kauai. Then, on a brisk March morning, a package arrives by courier that shatters her fragile peace of mind - a chilling message that claims Richard's fatal fall from a towering island cliff was no accident. It was murder. It is news that enrages the normally self-contained Henrie O, and creates a summons she cannot ignore.

One of America's most highly acclaimed mystery writers brings us another installment in the career of Henrietta "Henrie O" Collins, an ex-reporter turned sleuth. These days, Henrie O is teaching journalism at Thorndyke University, where she encourages an ambitious student to pursue an investigative series about three unrelated and hitherto unsolved local crimes. But the student's study habits get her killed.

Annie can hardly believe it: The police say her husband, Max, sits behind bars. They speak of him with a beautiful blonde. By the time Annie bails Max out, the blonde has disappeared and Max is the prime suspect in a crime. The baffling, bloodstained trail leads to the home of the Tarrants, a venerable Southern family with a violent history dating back to the Revolution - and ghosts of a more recent vintage. Infighting and mayhem reign in the family, and a killer wants hide the secrets that haunt the Tarrants.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, known to her friends as Henrie O, is America's favorite ex-journalist turned sleuth. These days she's looking forward to a quiet holiday at a wealthy friend's mountain cabin in Tennessee. Instead, Henrie O finds herself in the middle of another murder mystery - this time in the well-heeled neighborhood of Fair Haven. Married to the daughter of a prominent citizen, her friend's nephew appears one morning covered in his wife's blood - but he swears he didn't kill her.

Everyone - including mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance - loves Arsenic and Old Lace. But something wicked has poisoned a local summer stock production: The star, aging Hollywood beach-blanket hunk Shane Petree, butchers his lines - while getting top billing in bed with wives and teenage daughters around town. No wonder somebody wants to draw his final curtain. A pompous prosecutor tries to pin a murder on Max, Annie's own leading man. Unless Annie can prove her darling's innocence, their wedding date's off!

The Women's Club prides itself on the success of its annual White Elephant Sale, but this year's sale is marred by a bizarre turn. A blackmailer coerces five of the town's citizens into donating valuable artifacts. When a volunteer fails to show up on time, Henny Brawley drives off to find the missing woman, just as a powerful squall hits the island. Hours later, a worried Annie Darling goes off in search of Henny, only to find the corpse of the missing volunteer. The victim turns out to be the blackmailer.

A frantic phone call from an old and dear friend on the other side of the world sends Henrie O to San Antonio, Texas, in search of her friend's granddaughter, Iris Chavez. Iris had been working at the family-owned Tesoros Gallery, a shop renowned for the priceless treasures it hunts for its rich and famous patrons. Iris has disappeared without a word; Her apartment has been ransacked, yet nothing is missing. And nobody at Tesoros seems to care. Why? Somewhere in the gallery or among the family members is a secret....

In honor of Agatha Christie's 100th birthday, mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance Darling plans a week-long celebration of mystery, treasure hunts, and Christie trivia. But the last thing she or her guests expect is that the scheduled fun and mayhem will include a real-life murder. The unexpected arrival of Neil Bledsoe, the most despised book critic in America, was sure to raise a few hackles. An advocate of hard-boiled detection and gory true crime, Bledsoe drops a bombshell on the devoted Christie assemblage....

Annie and Max Darling watch the Fourth of July festival explode not only with fun and fireworks, but with murder as well. A library board newcomer who also happens to be a retired Brigadier General maneuvers the theme of the festival, which is to benefit the library, into his own vision: "Points of Patriotism." His takeover attitude has alienated everyone, including Annie, who finds it difficult to ignore him - especially when he's shot dead before her eyes.

Mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance didn't really want to go to her neighbor's Valentine Day masked ball - particularly not after the voluptuous brunette made a pass at Annie's husband, Max. So when her dizzy mother-in-law, Laurel, made a surprise visit to Broward's Rock Island, Annie thought it would be a perfect excuse to skip the party. She should have known better: True to form, Laurel accepted the invitation for all three of them. But the biggest surprise of all came at the party's end, when Annie found the amorous hostess in the gazebo - murdered.

Annie Darling, popular proprietress of the Death on Demand bookstore, has done it again! Her murder-mystery cruise in the waters off her not-always-idyllic isle of Broward's Rock is sure to be a roaring success, with every participant dressing up as a favorite fictional sleuth. And sure enough, everything goes swimmingly, until one of the revelers plunges overboard. And despite hubby Max Darling's courageous rescue attempt, faux murder turns all too quickly into real-life death.

Get ready to cheer for Kate Cadogan, a forty-something woman who has spent her life trying to please her husband, her son, her mother, and her father without a moment's thought to her own needs. Until one day when a series of events causes her to slip back in time.

When Amy Hawkins, a young dot-com executive from California who has made her fortune at the top of NASDAQ, overhears a pair of elderly and thus much wiser socialites decry the new generation for their incompetence in all things worldly, she sets off for Europe to find culture, her roots, and maybe a cause to devote her considerable fortune to.

Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand mystery bookstore, is understandably upset. It isn't like her P.I. husband Max to abruptly disappear—and homicide is definitely not his style. But when his car is found abandoned on a remote road with a brutally slain, once-beautiful young woman nearby and the murder weapon stashed in the trunk, Annie's worst fears seem justified.

Intrigue and foul play are no strangers to the idyllic South Carolina sea island of Broward's Rock. Mystery bookstore owner Annie Darling and her husband, Max, who specialize in solving problems, plunge into a startling web of danger and deceit when a trio of deaths is linked to the island's youth recreation center.

Shortly after his wife, the mother of his two teenage children, ends her life by jumping from the window of their Manhattan apartment, Arthur King decides he must return with his family to his home state of Wyoming. There, his mother welcomes her wounded son and her bereft grandchildren to her much loved but now quite diminished ranch. But how long will they stay?

When wealthy, widowed art patron Virginia Neville officially announces her engagement to Jake O'Neill, her handsome, charming, and much younger fiance, at a gala gallery opening, not all the gathered friends and stepfamily are pleased. And before the last champagne bubble pops, murder disrupts the grand celebration.

Annie Darling's yuletide preparations have been put on hold because her mother-in-law, Laurel, has taken to chatting up ghosts in the local graveyard. Across Broward's Rock, onetime movie star Marguerite Dumaney Ladson has called together all of her kin and their exes for a gala celebration. Among the honored guests are Annie's father and Dr. Emory Swanson. Ladson has fallen for Swanson's new-age-pseudo-occult gobbledygook. Right after the announcement that she's leaving her fortune to the charlatan's Evermore Foundation, there's a murder.

English food is all well and good in its place, but for expatriate amateur sleuth Dorothy Martin, there's nothing like a good Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings to make November seem complete. In the midst of the preparations, though, when Dorothy gets a call to help out for one day at the local school because Amanda Doyle just hasn't shown up, she does agree to help; she was, after all, a schoolteacher.