Most Popular Books by CHARLOTTE MACLEOD

A “funny and exciting” mystery in the series featuring a husband-and-wife sleuthing team in Boston (Publishers Weekly). Boston and its suburbs are stuffed with Kellings, and the city is about to get one more. Sarah Kelling and her husband Max Bittersohn—a pair of amateur sleuths equally at home in back alleys as they are at black-tie balls—are about to have a baby. And if the child takes after his parents, he will be one of the cleverest infants in New England. But while Sarah is a month away from giving birth, she cannot let pregnancy slow her down—she has a murder to solve. A resident at one of Sarah’s Uncle Dolph’s homeless centers is found mugged and murdered on one of Boston’s seedier side streets. Someone at the shelter has been dealing drugs, and plans to frame Uncle Dolph for the murder. Now Sarah and Max must race to clear Dolph’s name, lest the newest Kelling arrive before his family honor can be restored.

Family ties draw Boston’s art sleuths into an island murder mystery in this “unalloyed pleasure” from the international bestselling author (Publishers Weekly). Though a few years past sixty, Sarah Kelling’s Aunt Emma is as vigorous as a girl of twenty-two. She sings, she dances, and when the local fire department needs a fundraising boost, she’s happy to jump out a window for charity. This summer, she decamps to Maine, to beat the heat at an island retreat for artists and great thinkers. There are writers, painters, a psychic, and a historian, and their company promises to be great fun—until a few of them go treasure-crazy. Sensible people have long dismissed rumors of the Pocapuk Island treasure as myth, but artists are seldom sensible. When their rampant digging stirs up buried trouble, it leads to theft, drugging, and a murder. And although Sarah and her husband Max give investigative advice by phone, it’s up to Aunt Emma to save the islanders from themselves.

The Mystery Fancier, Volume Seven Number One, January-February 1983, contains: "Captain Joseph T. Shaw''s Black Mask Scrapbook," by E. R. Hagemann, "Detection by Other Means," by Bob Sampson, "Joe Orton''s and Tom Stoppard''s Burlesques of the Detective Genre," by Earl F. Bargainnier, "Bloody Balaclava: Charlotte MacLeod''s Campus Comedy Mysteries," by Jane S. Bakerman and "Spy Series Characters in Hardback, Part XIII," by Barry Van Tilburg.

A gang of thieves determined to steal every Praxiteles Lumpkin weathervane in Balaclava County winds up snatching Helen Shandy as well, and it is up to her husband Peter to set her free

Kriminalroman.