Footprints to Murder

August 5, 2013
After a slow beginning, Talley’s 12th Hannah Ives mystery (after 2012’s The Last Refuge) delivers steady wit, intrigue, and shocks. Hannah, a feisty grandmother and cancer survivor, joins her two compatible sisters and 14-year-old niece, Julie, on an eight-day cruise from Baltimore to Bermuda aboard the luxurious Islander. Once at sea, Hannah befriends David Warren, a terse and edgy passenger traveling solo, and discovers that his grown daughter, Charlotte, disappeared 18 months earlier from the Islander’s sister ship while working at their teen camp. What’s more, a young girl was viciously attacked on that cruise. Later, Julie is given alcohol-laced drinks, and, more disturbing, is assaulted, beaten, and dumped in a remote area of the ship. Is this somehow connected to Charlotte’s disappearance and the earlier attack? David and Hannah make a determined (if not always rational) team in a basically lighthearted read that builds to a satisfying conclusion. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency.

October 1, 2016
A West Coast convention for Bigfoot believers takes a hairy turn.After happily meeting up with her former roommate Susan Lockley at their 40th college reunion at Oberlin in Ohio, Hannah Ives takes a slight detour on her return trip home to Annapolisall the way to the Flat Rock Mountain Lodge in Oregon, venue of the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial. Susan, the events organizer, suddenly needs an assistant, and she taps Hannah. Perhaps the distance from her husband, whos somewhere in the Atlantic on a naval training cruise, makes Hannah more susceptible than usual to one of the conventioneers, handsome ex-detective Jake Cummings, whos attending with his retired K-9 partner. Jake is a Squatcher who works with the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. To anyone less charming, Hannah might not restrain her skepticism. Far less polite is Martin Radcliffe, a professional debunker. At his opening-night session, he insults Jim Davis, whos set up a 360-degree motion-activated video camera near the lodge to track Bigfoot. The next day, a lecture on Bigfoot scat is interrupted when something activates Davis camera. The live feed shows a huge apelike creature and a bludgeoned body wearing Radcliffes trademark lime-green sneakers. Hannah not only helps Susan keep the conference on track, but also works with Jake and the local sheriff to sort out the suspects, including Davis and four other attendees whom Radcliffe publicly humiliated: the scatologist, the author of the definitive book on Bigfoot, a Sasquatch hunter hoping to find Bigfoot living in lava caves, and the Native American who found the caves by pendulum divination. But are Hannah and Jake looking in the right direction? Could the killer have something else to gain from Radcliffes death? Or could it actually have been a Bigfoot wielding a very large stick? As Talleys 15th cozy reminds us once more, you cant take her genial heroine (Daughter of Ashes, 2015, etc.) anywhere without her stumbling into a different form of homicide.

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