Red Beans and Rituals is book two in The Witches of the French Quarter mystery series by Jen Pitts. While readers can easily devour this delicious mystery on its own, book one (Mardi Gras and Magic) is equally delightful and reveals some excellent back story.
She Left is a locked room mystery, with a limited number of characters that the reader gets to know intimately. In a special nod to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the characters are invited to a remote location by a well-known journalist who wants to interview each of them about a mass murder that happened 20 years ago. Upon arrival, they don’t find a journalist, they find the crazed mother of the young man that confessed to the crime of setting off a bomb then knifing survivors.
The Band begins with a breezy narration full of footnotes covering the rise – and fall? – of a female Korean pop band attempting to forge their success in the States. They hope that connecting with another Korean idol who has found popularity in America will give them a boost up, but ominous hints would indicate that it’s about to go wrong.
Emily Kelton is a probationary reporter for the Standard, a scrappy, Boston daily newspaper. The job is a step up from the suburban weekly she’d spent two years writing for, but her success there gave her a strong dose of confidence: she knows how to report. She’s a lone wolf, with ambition to move out of the cop beat to the City Hall bureau, which her friend Roz covers, and then to larger political entities. Just prove it to Saul, her editor, she thinks.
After her father was shot and killed when she was 14 years old, Jessie Madison was forced to step in for her alcoholic mother and raise her troubled younger sister Kayla. It also cemented Jessie’s decision to become an FBI agent in order to solve her father’s murder, but she’s forced to abandon her training when Kayla’s drug addiction forces Jessie to quit.
When you’re a PI and dealing with Southie mobs, it’s a tightrope walk. Doing a favor, taking a job from both the Irish and the Italians at the same time, is working without a net. On the other hand, the reward is worth the risk, isn’t it? Shane Cleary convinces himself it is.
While Phoenix’s Channel Four Eyewitness News reporter Jolene Garcia’s passion is to pursue investigative stories that not only make a difference but also could win her an Emmy, she also must spend half of her time following her general manager’s (or his wife’s) orders to pursue click-baiting assignments. But the call that has her once again missing her chance to enjoy a decent meal, is the one that could do both, as the right-wing radio show host Larry Lemmon has been found dead at his station, possibly poisoned by delivered cookies.
Well, not exactly a new me, but a new voice for my fiction. My published books have always been in the voice of the experienced, logical small-town chief of police Samuel Craddock. Having grown up with a grandfather and father who were storytellers, I always had the voice of a man in my head. It seemed natural to write in the voice of a man. An older man loosely based on my grandfather.
After their mother and father died, Crystal and Cory share the family home. They don’t spend a lot of time together. He lives in the basement and operates his own dog training school while she has taken over the second floor and is a new detective with the Chicago Police Department. They cross paths on the first floor.
Deadly Adversaries by Terry Odell is the newest entry into her Mapleton Mystery series, but as with all the books in the series, each title can be read as a stand-alone.
