Showing results for "The Group" in Amateur Sleuths

Summer is busy season for Mackenzie "Mac" Almeida's bicycle shop, nestled in the quaint, seaside hamlet of Westham, Massachusetts. She's expecting an influx of tourists at Mac's Bikes; instead she discovers the body of Jake Lacey. Mac can't imagine anyone stabbing the down-on-his-luck handyman. However, the authorities seem to think Mac is a strong suspect after she was spotted arguing with Jake just hours before his death. Mac knows she didn't do it, but she does recognize the weapon - her brother Derrick's fishing knife.

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years, and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway.... But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems.

East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, OAPs are getting hoodwinked, children are missing. But word has spread: if you've got a case the police can't or won't touch, Isaiah Quintabe will help you out. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford. But now he needs a client who can pay.

When your mother is an astrologist and your dad is a minister, you learn to keep an open mind. Which is just what Mac loves to do - exercise her mind by puzzling out fictional clues in the mystery novels she reads and discusses with her Cozy Capers Book Group. But now Mac's friend Gin has found herself in a sticky situation. After wealthy genealogist Beverly Ruchart is found dead outside Gin's taffy shop, the candy maker becomes a person of interest.

Damian Baxter is very rich and dying. He lives alone, attended by chauffeur, butler, cook and a housemaid, a life of everything and nothing. Before he goes he needs to know if he has a living heir. At stake is his fortune - in excess, he reckons, of £500 million. By the time he married he was sterile (the result of adult mumps in his early twenties), but what about before that unfortunate illness? Had he fathered a child as a young man?

A rainy July weekend in Westham means the beaches are empty and business is dead at Mac's Bikes, but couldn't be livelier inside the Rusty Anchor Pub. But come Monday morning, one patron is not so lively when the chef opens up and finds a body behind the bar. It's last call for Bruce Byrne, an elderly high school teacher who's been around so long it seems like he taught everybody.

Some wounds need more than time. They crave revenge. Claire's father is a privileged man: handsome, brilliant, the product of an aristocratic lineage and an expensive education, surrounded by a group of devoted friends who would do anything for him. But when he becomes the prime suspect in a horrific attack on Claire's mother - a pretty little thing who married into the elite ranks of society and dared escape her gilded cage - fate and privilege collide, and a scandal erupts. Claire's father disappears overnight, his car abandoned, blood on the front seat.

Anna knows what lies look like. She can see untruths spill from heads and turn the air bright orange. Only her sister knows about Anna's synaesthesia and how she can read a person's emotions - even when they're trying to hide them. When she gets a job as a Mother's Help to a family whose niece, Lily, is missing, Anna is given the lost girl's room, and the mystery around Lily begins to haunt her.

Everyone loves a festival, though Mac has a few concerns about the Spring equinox event organized by the new Chamber of Commerce director, Wagner Lavoie. After all, March weather is unpredictable. Still, there's plenty to enjoy, between flower-shaped candies at Salty Taffy's, spring rolls at the Rusty Anchor, and a parade of decorated bicycles. But the festivities soon take a stormy turn . . . Mac glimpses conflict between Wagner and other locals during the festival, but it's a shock when he's found dead in the Book Nook, pinned beneath a toppled bookshelf.

'Tis the day after Christmas, following a wicked-busy time of year for Mac's bike shop. It's just as well her Cozy Capers Book Group's new pick is a nerve-soothing coloring book mystery, especially when she has last-minute wedding planning to do. But all pre-wedding jitters fade into the background when Mac and her fiancé, Tim, begin a cottage renovation project and open up a wall to find a skeleton dressed in an old-fashioned bridal gown. As Mac delves into the decades-old mystery, she discovers a story of star-crossed lovers and feuding families worthy of the bard himself.

From clam chowdahs to oysters on the half-shell, Tulia Peters' Lobstah Shack offers locals and tourists in Westham, Massachusetts, some of Cape Cod's most amazing cuisine. But when the body of Annette DiCicero is discovered in the kitchen's walk-in freezer - with a custom-made claw-handled lobster pick lodged in her neck - spoiled appetites are the least of Tulia's worries.

My name is Kate. I volunteer at a local charity - young people who have run away from home call me and I pass on messages to their loved ones, no questions asked. I don't get many phone calls, and those I do are usually short and vague, or pranks. But this morning a girl named Sophie called. I'm supposed to contact her parents to let them know their child is safe. The problem is, Sophie isn't safe. And Sophie is my daughter.

Eighteen years ago Martha said good-bye to best friend Juliet on a moonlit London towpath. The next morning Juliet's bike was found abandoned. She was never seen again. Nearly two decades later Martha is a TV celebrity, preparing to host a new crime show...and the first case will be that of missing student Juliet Sherman. After all these years Martha must reach out to old friends and try to piece together the final moments of Juliet's life. But what happens when your perfect friends turn out to be perfect strangers?

Knit and Nibble's numbers are growing! The knitting club just welcomed their newest member, Caralee Lorimer, who's learning to knit for her upcoming role in A Tale of Two Cities. According to the amateur actress, the behind-the-scenes drama at the theater is getting downright catty, and Caralee wants a reckoning for Arborville's pretentious suburbanites. But before she can finish her snitchy stitches, Caralee is killed in a suspicious theater accident. Someone thinks they've staged a perfect murder, but Pamela and her Knit and Nibblers are ready to pounce on the real killer.

At 11 years old, Morgan Sheppard solved the murder of his maths teacher when everyone else believed it to be a suicide. Twenty-five years later... Morgan Sheppard wakes up handcuffed to a bed in an unfamiliar hotel room, with five strangers waking up around him. In the bathroom - a corpse. One of the people in the room is the killer, and Sheppard has three hours to solve the murder. If he doesn't find the killer, they all die.

New York, January 1896: Arthur Conan Doyle, the renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the Britannic Hotel with his wife, Louisa, ready to begin his first American tour. While he prepares his lectures, Louisa becomes mesmerised by this brash, vibrant, dangerous city, especially when a woman's brutally butchered corpse is found in a Bowery alley and Louisa is convinced from the artist's sketch in the paper that she'd seen the victim at the hotel.

Native American psychologist Ben Pecos has returned to the New Mexico pueblo of his birth as an intern with the Indian Health Service. Still struggling with his past, he is plunged into the nightmare rampage of a mysterious illness that is killing the residents of the pueblo, including his own grandmother. One of the victims, the tribal governor, had made powerful enemies, and Ben suspects his murder was premeditated—but that doesn't explain the insidious killer now stalking the innocent. Undaunted, Ben digs deep to root out a killer whose deadly agenda is spiraling out of control.

When single mom and recent widow Cameron Chandler takes a much-needed job at Penny-wise Investigations, a detective agency conveniently located in a suburban shopping mall, she grabs the chance to reinvent herself. Her first case is to locate a runaway girl, something her predecessor had been pursuing before he disappeared. Following in his footsteps, the trail leads to a survivalist camp on a remote island in northern Puget Sound. Armed with only a Swiss Army Knife and her quirky on-the-job training as a suburban sleuth, Cameron uncovers more than she bargained for.