Showing results for "Darling" in Mystery

Lady Darling is a woman "of a certain age." Fifty, to be specific, which, in the eyes of London society, makes her uninteresting, eccentric, and a little intimidating. She's a widow. An empty-nester (all of her children are very successfully married off). She's titled, influential… and very, very rich. Now she just wants to be left alone to enjoy her pets, her gardens, and her books. Until someone turns up dead at a dinner party, and Lady Darling is on the scene. What's a smart, responsible, capable woman to do? Find the killer, of course!

The course of true love never did run smooth for PI Mike Hammer. His secretary and partner, Velda, has walked out on him without explanation, and Mike is just surfacing from a four-month bender. But then an old cop turns up murdered - a cop who once worked with Velda on the NYPD Vice Squad. What's more, Mike's pal, Captain Pat Chambers, has discovered that Velda is in Florida, now the moll of gangster and drug runner Nolly Quinn.

Mildred Kilgore and Earlynne Biddle are planning to open a bakery on the square - if they can come up with the right recipes. Charlie Dickens faces two of the biggest puzzles of his career as an investigative reporter, and one of them involves his wife. Cute little Cupcake's talent as a singer and dancer makes her a tempting target for an unscrupulous exploiter. Lizzy must enlist the Dahlias to protect her while she herself is confronted by a romantic puzzle. And Sheriff Norris is forced to reopen a puzzling mystery that the town thought was solved.

It looks like the music has ended for Darling's favorite barbershop quartet, the Lucky Four Clovers, just days before the Dixie Regional Barbershop Competition. Another unlucky break comes when there's a serious foul-up in Darling's telephone system - and not a penny for repairs. And while liquor is legal again, moonshine isn't. Sheriff Buddy Norris needs a little luck when he goes into Briar Swamp to confront Cypress County's most notorious bootlegger - and what he finds upends his sense of justice.

Spring, 1935 finds the little Alabama town of Darling excited about their new local radio station, WDAR. But there are problems brewing at the newspaper, where a trio of new hires causes headaches for Editor Charlie Dickens. That’s not the worst of it, though, as the Dahlias discover when the newest resident at Bessie Bloodworth’s Magnolia Manor is found dead. She had overindulged in a large and very rich chocolate cake - but was something else baked into that cake?

It’s Labor Day weekend, 1935, and the Darling Dahlias—the garden club in little Darling, Alabama—are trying to keep their cool at the end of a sizzling summer. This isn’t easy, though, since there’s a firebug on the loose in Darling. He—or she!—strikes without apparent rhyme or reason, and things have gotten to the point where nobody feels safe. What’s more, a dangerous hurricane is poised to hurl itself in Darling’s direction, while a hurricane of a different sort is making a whirlwind campaign stop: the much-loved-much-hated senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long.

Jacob Rigolet - a soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector - looks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, the former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa's Death on a Leipzig Balcony. What's more, Jacob's police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation.

It's a time of change for the Last Chance Saloon—recent promotions have changed the focus of the Unit, and when a Fleet Street Legend, Hunt Robinson, is kidnapped from Heathrow Airport and found close to death in the crypt of Fleet Street's St Bride's Church, DI Declan Walsh and his colleagues need to put the past behind them, and unite to take on the case.

When Melanie Hunter goes missing it is completely out of character for the polite, friendly palaeontologist, and the men in her life come under suspicion. And there’s plenty to suspect: lies, half-truths, deceptions.... It soon becomes clear that there are secrets in Melanie’s past, and pain she tried to hide from the world. Bill Slider and his team investigate, and if they are to succeed then they will need to find the answer to two questions: Who loved Melanie? And who loved her too much?

Sheriff Elizabeth Benoit has her sights on bringing down Eckardt County's corruption when two bodies surface, both bearing striking similarities to the serial killer victims discovered along I-80—and one delivers a personal message for her department. Lila spirals out of control under the pressure, pushing everyone out of her life.

Luck runs out for three poker players when a gunman calmly shoots them dead. DI Jack Knox quickly establishes that the intended target, the leader of a bank heist many years before, has slipped the net. But his team has to split up when a young woman, the daughter of a prominent figure, goes missing from the city centre. Suspecting she has been kidnapped, the search heads from Edinburgh to the Scottish Borders. Will the detectives find her abductor in time?

Mallory is back and facing a two-fisted whodunit: Who’s responsible for the just-discovered “lost novel” by the celebrated author of The Maltese Falcon? Is it the master, Dashiell Hammett, himself, or a very cunning counterfeiter? And who’s behind the shocking, suspicious demise of Roscoe Kane, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled crime-novel pioneer? Aptly enough, this one-two punch of a puzzle is the talk of Bouchercon, the famed convention where mystery scribes gather to honor (and murder?) their own.

"'I'm trying to get back in shape,'" she said. Man, if her shape got any better she'd be banned for just walking down the street. I'm Shell Scott, private eye, and my job was to guard her day - yeah, and night. I didn't have a chance to discuss these points with her because I saw the man walking toward us. There was only one of him but he seemed to outnumber me. He was so big I was surprised his feet didn't leave holes behind him in the concrete. "Shell Scott," he rumbled. "Shake." I hardly dared....

'The scarlet bikini which had covered a minimum of the eye-popping curves on the dead woman, lay at her feet, and my eyes focussed on her as glassily as did the dead man’s next to her. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of. Me? I’m Shell Scott, private detective and I’m wondering why anybody in his right mind would commit such a complicated murder....'

After Olenka Plemyannikova’s father dies, she marries Ivan Kukin - the owner of the local theater. She soon takes over some of his paperwork-related roles and becomes more involved in the business. Unfortunately, Kukin dies in Moscow during one of his work-related travels. Olenka’s grief does not last too long and she soon gets married to a timber yard worker named Vasily Pustovalov. They live a happily and comfortable life together, until one day Pustovalov gets sick and dies a few days later.

Home again at CEANN MARA Station on the banks of the Darling River, where she spent a happy childhood with her four sisters, Cat O'Byrne feels safe. Scarred by a harrowing attack at university, she falls into the familiar, nursing both her body and her trust in all that she once believed in. Logan Wainwright—a detective on leave and the new property owner across the river—has his own demons. Together with Cat, he begins to heal as he assists her with her family history research, and their attraction to each other grows.

Roisin O'Byrne, a young lawyer with a passion for protecting the Darling River where her family has lived for almost two hundred years, finds herself embroiled in a battle. Her commitment to environmental justice pits her against formidable adversaries within the corporate landscape, working with her enigmatic boss Seth Brodie. As her family continue their quest to uncover the history of the settlement of Ceann Mara and the hidden life of one of its first settlers, Samuel O'Byrne, Roisin plunges deeper into the murky waters of corporate interests and corruption.

Genie and her ghostly great-great-aunt Adriana have been too busy with their gelato business and helping with the restoration of the old speakeasy to notice that something isn't quite right in their small town. Until pranks with touch of the macabre haunt the neighborhood, right before Halloween. But it gets worse. When a locked room murder case points straight at a connection to dark forces, the sleuthing duo fears for the living—and the not-quite so departed. Can they root out the evil in their midst before it ends Adriana’s happy afterlife—forever?

The stories for this annual collection of the Mystery Writers of America were selected for their strange and exotic locales. Breathtaking suspense, cold-blooded crime, and challenging twists of plot—set in the four corners of the world—make this recording a chilling audio experience.

Sheriff Kyle of Deadeye, Nevada, is headed east to the nation’s capital. Kyle’s about to discover that the law can be even wilder in the big city than in the Wild West. It’s a fact that hits home when he’s the one accused...of murder. Kyle’s come to the city to give a report to his senator on the misdeeds of Nevada’s filthy rich copper kings. But before he has a chance, he’s knocked unconscious, later coming to alongside his senator - now dead, with Kyle’s knife embedded in the corpse.