To the Last Drop

July 7, 2014
In Anthony Award finalist Balzo’s spirited third Main Street Murder mystery (after 2012’s Dead Ends), Wisconsin journalist AnnaLise Griggs is still visiting her hometown, Sutherton, N.C., where she’s acknowledged as the love-child of the wealthiest man in town, Dickens Hart. The proprietor of a “North Carolina High Country rip-off of the Playboy Club concept,” Hart wants to locate any other children he may have fathered, and an elaborate Thanksgiving weekend is planned for past loves and their appropriate-aged off-spring. Before the turkey is served, Hart is found lying naked in bed with his head bashed in—and AnnaLise is the prime suspect. The supporting cast includes several colorful Sutherton citizens and a motley group of potential heirs accompanied by their hopeful mothers. AnnaLise will remind Southern cozy fans of Kathleen Haines’s Sarah Booth Delaney, Carolyn Hart’s Annie Darling, and Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary Agency.

September 5, 2016
Someone kills dental surgeon William Swope by throwing him out his 10th-floor office window in Balzo’s entertaining ninth mystery featuring Brookhills, Wis., coffee shop owner Maggy Thorsen (after 2013’s Murder on the Orient Espresso). Maggy has more than one personal link to the victim. Swope shared his dental practice with Ted Thorsen, Maggy’s ex-husband; Maggy recently consulted Swope’s wife, Lynne, a financial planner, about her inheritance; and Maggy’s son, Eric, got a lift from school from Swope’s daughter the day of the murder. Suspects include a woman who has been picketing the dentists’ office for their being in cahoots with a government plot, and an irate dentist from Louisville, Ky., who blames Swope for illegal business practices and drug use. Maggy can’t keep out of the case, even if it costs her relationship with the investigating sheriff, Jake Pavlik, her boyfriend. Maggy makes an appealing amateur sleuth, though the story would have benefited from more action and fewer discussions and less analysis. Agent: Nancy Yost, Nancy Yost Literary Agency.

October 1, 2016
Against the wishes of her boyfriend, Sheriff Jake Pavlik, Maggy Thorsen, part owner of Uncommon Grounds, a coffee shop in Brookhills, Wisconsin, turns sleuth after her ex-husband Ted's former dental-office partner, William Swopes, is found dead. Was his fall from the tenth story of his office building suicide or murder? Suspects include Ted himself as well as a seemingly unbalanced woman who followed Swopes from Kentucky; Ted's daughter, Ginny; and his wife, Lynne, who just filed for divorce due to Ted's many infidelities. Even though Maggy has only known the Swopes family for a short time, she agrees to help Lynne and Ginny, after they emerge as the chief suspects. The self-deprecating Maggy makes an endearing cozy protagonist, and the coffee-shop frame story is brimming with interesting details. There are numerous mystery series starring women who own small businesses and who have some kind of personal connection to law enforcement. Suggest Maggy's adventures to fans of Chris Cavender's Pizza mysteries, Elizabeth J. Duncan's Penny Brannigan series, and Laura Child's Tea Shop mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)