Best Selling Books by Charlotte MacLeod

Murder turns a Christmas trip into a working holiday for Mountie Madoc Rhys and his bride-to-be in this holiday whodunit from the “cozy mystery queen” (Early Bird Books). Though he may not look the part, Madoc Rhys is a Mountie—and his keen sense of detection tells him it’s time to ask Janet Wadman to marry him. They have just gotten engaged when Christmas rolls around, and Janet’s boss invites them to his family estate for a last holiday fling before Janet leaves her job. After a long helicopter ride, they are at Graylings, ancestral home of the Condryckes, a family so strange that Canada’s shortest Mountie fits right in. There is a psychic old woman, an erudite butler, and a family patriarch who is the spitting image of an English country squire. And when the elderly Mrs. Condrycke is found murdered, Janet will be glad she brought Madoc along. Though civilization is far away, when there is a Mountie in the house, justice is close at hand.

A widowed gardener meets a ghost from frontier times who’s out for revenge: “The screwball mystery is Charlotte MacLeod’s cup of tea” (Chicago Tribune). Zilla Trott is pouring her cat some chamomile tea when the drifter appears in her kitchen. He is grubby and crude—not at all the kind of person you’d usually find in the pleasant town of Lobelia Falls—but something about him intrigues the aging widow. Perhaps it’s his rugged good looks, or the way he seems to come from another time and place. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s been dead for nearly a century. When Lobelia Falls was in its rough-and-tumble frontier infancy, Hiram Jellyby was the best mule driver the town had ever seen, until an argument over a hidden cache of gold left him bleeding to death in a back alley. He returns in spectral form to secure a proper burial, and finds that in modern-day Lobelia Falls, no one knows more about turning the soil than Zilla Trott’s gardening buddies—all members of Dittany Monk’s fearless Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club.

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.

A small town gardening—and archery—club must solve a murder case and save their town from developers in the first cozy mystery featuring Dittany Henbit. Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn’t. Dittany is giving him what-for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill, and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn’t the target. She and the surveyor find Mr. Architrave, the head of the water department, not far away—lying dead beneath the trees that he loved so much. Progress is coming to Lobelia Falls, and one resident will do anything to stop it. But in a town where every child can shoot, how can Dittany discover who drew the killer bow?

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.

Kriminalroman.