Guaranteed to Bleed

August 31, 2015
Set in the fall of 1974, Mulhern’s lively, witty sequel to The Deep End finds Kansas City, Mo., socialite Ellison Russell reluctantly attending a high school football game (“Personally, I’d rather be audited by the IRS than sit through a game”). But as a loyal mom, she’s there to support Grace, her cheerleader daughter. When Ellison drops her lipstick, she makes the mistake of going to look for it under the stands. There she stumbles on a dying teenage boy covered in blood, who asks that she tell his girlfriend that he loves her. Ellison determines to learn the girlfriend’s identity and deliver the message, plus find the boy’s killer, but then she discovers that Grace is missing. If that’s not enough for one day, an unknown man turns up shot to death in her garden. Cozy fans will eagerly await Ellison’s further adventures.

September 15, 2015
While under the bleachers at a football game retrieving her expensive tube of lipstick, Ellison Russell finds the dying Bobby Lowell. The teen's last words are, Tell her I love her, so Ellison, determined to fulfill Bobby's last wish, tries to locate the girl Bobby loved. However, no one seems to know her identity. Ellison perseveres in her quest, but then her teenage daughter and a friend disappear, and the frantic Ellison must locate them before they come to harm. Two men, lawyer Hunter Tafft and detective Anarchy Jones, are romantically interested in Ellison, but she is hesitant to trust again after being duped by her cheating husband, murdered several months before. The charming Ellison must also circumvent her overbearing, interfering mother. Set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974, this cozy mystery effectively re-creates the era through the details of down-to-earth Ellison's everyday life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)