Think breaking into show business is hard? Try landing a temp job without office skills. That’s the challenge facing aspiring actress Isobel Spice when she arrives in New York City, fresh out of college and deficient in PowerPoint. After being rejected by seven temp agencies for her lack of experience, Isobel sweet-talks recruiter James Cooke into letting her cover a last-minute vacancy at a bank. New to his own job, and recently sober, James takes a chance on Isobel, despite his suspicion that she’s a trouble-magnet. His misgivings are borne out by lunchtime, when she stumbles across a dead secretary in a bathroom stall. With her fingerprints on the murder weapon, Isobel sets out to prove her innocence by investigating the crime herself. While learning to juggle phone lines and auditions, she discovers an untapped talent for detective work—a qualification few other office temps, let alone actresses, can claim.Please note: this is a contemporary cozy with an edge; contains some adult language.

    Her car has been stolen so she has to walk to the train station to get to her office at St. Thomas, a college in the Bronx, New York. When she arrived she finds two homicide detectives waiting for her. The good news is that they found her car; the bad news is that in the trunk was the body of one of the students in her Shakespeare seminar.Trying to get her name off of the handsome Detective Crawford’s suspect list turns out to be just one of her problems. Alison has to bail her ex out of jail; deal with the victim’s distraught parents, classmates of hers when she was a student at St. Thomas; and grade those Shakespeare exams, which seem to be getting a lot of attention for a boring old stack of reports. And in the meantime, who would want to kill college student Kathy Miceli?

    In a moment of weakness, Claire agrees to let charming aerobics instructor Enrique come to her house to give her a massage. She realizes she has made a deadly mistake when Enrique is shot and killed in her bedroom and her husband Roger is arrested for the murder. Determined to clear Roger's name and save her marriage, Claire sets out to find the real killer, encountering drug dealers, jealous ex-girlfriends, and angry cops along the way.

    Her sometime boyfriend's gone for good. The death of her beloved cat opened a bigger void. And the career leap she's made from copy editor to freelance writer has left her finances and her spirit flat. She desperately needs a headline to get her life back on track.One day, out for a stroll in her Cambridge neighborhood, Theda spies an adorable stray kitten. This charmer leads Theda to an old woman holed up in a decrepit house full of cats. Is this one of those "crazy cat ladies," a classic hoarder, or is the old woman a neighborhood do-gooder?More important, is this the story to catapult Theda out of the dumps?But when she returns to interview Lillian Helmhold, Theda finds her fascinating subject dead of an apparent accident. The neighbors are celebrating, the police aren't interested, and the cats are removed to a shelter. End of story. Not for Theda--one or two things don't compute. So Theda marshals her investigative journalism skills to turn gumshoe.

    Sophie Knowles teaches math at Henley College in Massachusetts, but when a colleague turns up dead, it's up to her to find the killer before someone else gets subtracted.

    Introducing CAST IRON WILL, Book 1 in the brand new cozy mystery series, the Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries, from New York Times Bestselling Author Jessica Beck! When a customer is murdered on the front porch of the Cast Iron Store and Grill with one of their favorite skillets, fraternal twins Pat and Annie must solve the crime, or they just might be next items on the killer’s to-do list.

    The mansion that Ashley Wilkes, historic preservationist, is restoring, with its crescendo-thumping spectral organist, is no exception. When Ashley makes a grisly discovery, the residents of quiet, quaint Orange Street are horrified. Halloween weekend finds Ashley and Melanie dressed to kill at the Cape Fear Crime Festival's costume party where an evil trickster treats them to murder.

     Despite the sudden loss of her aunt, Maeve Kinkaid is thrilled when she inherits the popular food truck Dogs on the Roll. She has no idea how cutthroat the food industry can be. She meets a Basque chef whose interest in her is overshadowed by his desire to possess the food truck, which he insists Maeve’s aunt promised to leave to him. And when the owner of a rival food truck is decapitated and served up like a gruesome new dish, Maeve becomes embroiled in a mystery that may cost her the food truck, the chef, and her life.

    Too bad his body didn't!Advertising copywriter Leigh Koslow doesn't pack heat--just a few extra pounds. And she doesn't go looking for trouble. When she moved into her cousin Cara's refurbished Victorian house, she wasn't planning on discovering a corpse--certainly not one that had been embalmed ten years before. But as anyone in the small Pittsburgh borough of Avalon could tell her, her cousin's house has a history attached. A history dating back to two mysterious deaths in the summer of 1949.Someone wants Leigh and Cara out of the house--someone who has something to hide. But that someone doesn't know Leigh's impetuous cousin, and when Cara digs her heels in, Leigh looks to her old college chum, local policewoman Maura Polanski, for help. But the answers the trio find only point to more questions. Were the scandalous deaths of fifty years ago really an accident and a suicide? Or were they murder?The nearer the women get to the truth, the more desperate someone becomes. Because some secrets are better off kept. Especially when they hit close to home!

    Pulling together the food, flowers and a thousand other details for one of the most significant social occasions of the year is her happily accepted responsibility. But when her husband's degenerate nephew is found murdered, it's more than the ball that is ruined. In fact, Lady Montfort fears that the official police enquiry, driven by petty snobbery and class prejudice, is pointing towards her son as a potential suspect.Taking matters into her own hands, the rather over-imaginative countess enlists the help of her pragmatic housekeeper, Mrs. Jackson, to investigate the case, track down the women that vanished the night of the murder, and clear her son's name. As the two women search for a runaway housemaid and a headstrong young woman, they unearth the hidden lives of Lady Montfort's close friends, servants and family and discover the identity of a murderer hiding in plain sight.In this enchanting debut sure to appeal to fans of Downton Abbey, Tessa Arlen draws readers into a world exclusively enjoyed by the rich, privileged classes and suffered by the men and women who serve them. Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman is an elegant mystery filled with intriguing characters and fascinating descriptions of Edwardian life—a superb treat for those who love British novels.

    Since she'd had words with the victim hours before, the police type her as the murderer--unless she's got a better alternative. Not easy for a determined loner like Liz, who has few friends and apparently one dangerous enemy. Luckily, her friends are more numerous than she suspected: the shrewd old ladies in her writing workshop, a charming real estate developer, and maybe even handsome detective Paul Drake--if he gets over thinking she's the killer. Yet none of them knows Liz quite as well as they think--and her past is closing in with a vengeance....

     What begins as a run of the mill, albeit tasty, assignment turns into something much more dangerous when one of the Cookie Jar’s employees is poisoned. Now Kat is chasing the biggest story of her life, while trying to catch the eye of her handsome editor and avoid becoming the killer’s next victim. A cozy novella: approximately 44,000 words

    It's a city with a small town feel, where she can crash on the couch of her best friend Jill, now that she's graduated from journalism school. . .But a girl needs a job, so Meg bluffs her way into writing for Northwest Extreme magazine, passing herself off to editor-in-chief Greg Dixon as an outdoor adventure enthusiast. Never mind that Meg's idea of sport is climbing onto the couch without spilling her latte. So when she finds herself clawing to the top of Angel's Rest--a two-thousand-foot peak--to cover the latest challenge in a reality TV adventure show, she can't imagine feeling more terrified. Until she witnesses a body plummet off the side of the cliff. Now Meg has a murder to investigate. And if the climbing doesn't kill her, a murderer just might. . .Includes Adventure Guides!

     After a car accident ended her medical career before it even started, Cassie moved to London on a whim, expecting to see the sights and live the typical tourist backpacker lifestyle. Instead she finds herself accompanying a French private detective, Violet Despuis, as they attempt to find out who poisoned four people in the middle of London. Cassie's life soon includes this crazy detective, an ancient landlady with a curious past, a mischeivous orange cat who likes going for walks on a leash, and a super hot pathologist that Cassie is sure is out of her league. And they haven't even found the murderer yet... The Cassie Coburn mysteries are a cozy mystery series featuring a Sherlock-holmes style sleuth. If you want a light, fun, modern mystery featuring a San Francisco girl totally out of her element in London, and a crazy French woman who happens to be very good at noticing things, then this is the series for you.

    Until he's murdered, that is. The case seems open and shut: when Aslan was killed he was inside a locked room with only five other people, one of whom has already confessed to the murder. Detective Inspector Richard Poole is hot, bothered, and fed up with talking to witnesses who'd rather discuss his 'aura' than their whereabouts at the time of the murder. But he also knows that the facts of the case don't quite stack up. In fact, he's convinced that the person who's just confessed to the murder is the one person who couldn’t have done it. Determined to track down the real killer, DI Poole is soon on the trail, and no stone will be left unturned.