Murder in Season

June 1, 2020

In Out of Hounds, Brown's latest "Sister Jane Arnold" mystery, the good sister deals with local tensions--and murder--when town newbies threaten her crowd's foxhunting ways. In Chow's Mimi Lee Reads Between the Lines, second in the "Sassy Cat Mysteries," Mimi Lee must rely on her debonair talking cat, Marshmallow, when her sister is accused of murdering a teaching colleague. In Ellis's The Diabolical Bones, which follows up the film-optioned The Vanished Bride, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bront� find their writing interrupted by a new case: bones have been discovered bricked up in a chimney at moldering Scar Top House. Eriksson's The Night of the Fire brings back popular Swedish police inspector Ann Lindell, who's retired to the country but not for long--someone has set fire to the old schoolhouse, now housing asylum seekers, and three people are dead (35,000-copy first printing). Fletcher/Land's Murder, She Wrote: Murder in Season joins the holiday mystery lineup as Jessica Fletcher acknowledges that despite her work on the annual Christmas pageant, she can't ignore two sets of bones (one old, one new) found on her property. Sulari Gentill follows up her LJ-starred, Ned Kelly Award-winning After She Wrote Him with A House Divided, set in 1931 Sydney, Australia, and starring gentleman bohemian Rowland Sinclair, who insinuates himself into a high-stepping (and sometimes conservative) crowd to discover who murdered his beloved Uncle Rowly. Ready to retire, former FBI agent and police consultant Gregor Demarkian takes on his last case in Haddam's One of Our Own, trying to figure out how elderly Marta Warkowski ended up in a coma--and in a big plastic garbage bag--and why her dead super is locked in her apartment (30,000-copy first printing). With The Turning Tide, McPherson, whose Dandy Gilver mysteries have received CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and Historical Macavity Award nominations, gives Dandy the task of figuring out why the local ferrywoman seems to have gone mad--and whether she has committed murder, as she claims. Finally, March's Murder in Old Bombay, winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award, captures Capt. Jim Agnihotri's efforts to find out what really happened when two Parsee women plunge from the university tower in 1892 Bombay (30,000-copy first printing).

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September 7, 2020
Land’s satisfying sixth Murder, She Wrote mystery (after The Murder of Twelve) finds writer-sleuth Jessica Fletcher reluctantly agreeing to play Mrs. Claus in the Cabot Cove, Maine, annual Christmas parade, and glad the renovation of her lovely old house is coming to an end. Then workmen digging up her lawn to install a new septic system discover the remains of two bodies, one dating from the late 18th century, as well as a colonial-era oak chest. While Jessica and friends are investigating the scene, Tad Hollenbeck, a reporter for a “tawdry tabloid show... promoting wacko theories,” arrives with his camera crew. He tells the startled Cabot Covians he’s doing a story on their town’s alarming per capita murder rate. A further examination of the evidence does indeed prove that the two bodies have been murdered, and the chest contains documents relating to the founding fathers of Cabot Cove. Then Tad, too, is murdered. Planning for the parade and other Christmas festivities provides counterpoint to the crime solving. This appealing—if murder-prone—world is a splendid place to spend a bit of the holiday season. Agent: Robert G. Diforio, D4EO Literary.

September 15, 2020
The arrival of Christmas cues a murderer to play Scrooge. Jessica Fletcher is finally moving back to her home that was ravaged by fire in Murder, She Wrote: The Murder of Twelve (2020). The only last-minute glitch is the new septic system that's required. Unfortunately, the folks digging up her yard discover an old chest and two corpses. Without missing a beat, Jessica sets to work with her old partners in crime-solving, Sheriff Mort Metzger and Dr. Seth Hazlitt. One body is fairly recent; the other may be hundreds of years old. Both interest muckraking reporter Tad Hollenbeck, of the TV show Stalker, who's doing a long-overdue piece on Cabot Cove as the murder capital of the world. The chest holds papers relating to the town's five founding families, who made their fortunes in shipping and milling and still have descendants in the area. In addition to papers of interest to historians, it contains shocking information about the founders' slave trading. For Jessica, who wonders if the sins of the past are still causing trouble, the most important document is the diary of John Henry Cabot, which she expects she'll have to put aside once she's called on to solve the murder of Tad Hollenbeck. The story of stolen diamonds in the diary, however, leads her to a motive for murder as the founders' surviving relatives become suspects (the lucky ones) and corpses (those less lucky) in a complex investigation that threatens to spoil Christmas. Cozy as a warm blanket as Jessica Fletcher hunts down yet another killer with her customary panache.

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