This jolly series debut from the husband-and-wife Lavene team serves up medieval murder and mayhem. USC doctoral candidate Jessie Morton studies medieval crafts every summer at Columbia, S.C.'s Renaissance Faire Village. While working with basket weaver Mary Shift, Jessie gets a shock when Mary's estranged husband, Joshua, is murdered in broad daylight. She quickly learns the actors at the Faire may be hiding more than their mundane lives. Jessie is certain that Mary is innocent of the murder, but also suspects the old weaver knows more than she's revealing.
After her life was downsized by a divorce and a pink slip, Zoey Jones moved back home to Blytheville, Missouri. Now tending bar at her uncle's watering hole, Zoey is working overtime to keep her rebellious teenage daughter and her eccentric parents out of trouble. Naturally, Blytheville's sexy top cop Hank Westlake picks this time to start rekindling old fires. But their tentative first date is a bust -- literally -- when Hank is forced to book Zoey's own father for murder. Sure, Charlie has been acting strange lately, but could he really be the bumbling burglar behind three convenience-store robberies? Actually, yes...but he has a very good reason.
Alex Delaware's relationship with his longterm partner is on the rocks. He is floored when Robin announces she's heading off on a three-month music tour. But he soon has other things to think about. He is sent an envelope with no return address. Inside, he finds an album with gold letters on it - THE MURDER BOOK. It's full of macabre pictures of murders, with brief descriptions of how, and why, the victims died. One picture is marked 'Not solved' - the horrifically mutilated body of a young woman. Unsettled, Alex calls his friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, who seems strangely familiar with the case. What connects the photograph with Milo's past?
People are voluntarily dying before their time in California. Some call it assisted suicide when cancer or heart disease or painful old age make the quality of life unbearable. Others say it is murder, that no-one has the right to help others take their own life.
Murder and Mayhem - A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers
This is an enormously entertaining collection of the best of Lyle's columns for the Mystery Writers of America newsletter, in which the doctor provides detailed and informative answers to questions regarding various aspects of medicine and forensics. Aspiring and experienced mystery writers will achieve verisimilitude, as well as the suspended disbelief of their audiences, by applying Lyle's insights, which he divides into three helpful sections: "Doctors, Hospitals, Illnesses, and Injuries"; "Methods of Murder and Mayhem"; and "Tracking the Perp."
