Bookstore Categories

MYSTERIES/SUSPENSE (Alphabetical by Author)

Crime Might Pay

Crime might pay
By Robert Archibald

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that crime might pay, and it might pay well.

Four friends had become vigilantes to combat the offenses they saw committed against the innocent. But a promise to the FBI means they can no longer break the law to seek justice for victims. A family crisis changes everything, and now they have no choice. They are driven to take some sort of action, even if it means skirting the law. Again.

Beth's mother and father are wrongfully sued and lose all their life's savings, and Beth is devastated. How will her parents cope with this financial disaster? Ralph is suspicious, however, and does not believe true justice was served in the courtroom.

When Ralph begins to dig, he uncovers some surprising secrets... including fraud, extortion, and money laundering. Something must be done to right this wrong. But what will happen when this group of friends pit themselves against a powerful judge and a corrupt group of lawyers?
In this next installment after Roundabout Revenge and Guilty Until Proven Innocent, the four friends once again set out to right the wrongs perpetrated by criminals who have the power to destroy people's lives. As the stakes escalate, only one question remains: Will they succeed this time or is this the end of a friendship... and maybe a life?

Found on Amazon 
 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Guilty until proven innocient
By Robert Archibald

Check your email. Help is out there…
When Sherry and Beth discover what their boyfriends have been up to, they want in on the action. Working as vigilantes and providing justice for wrongs committed is a noble thing to do, but the women decide the stakes need to change.
Once again, the conflict is personal.
This follow-up to Roundabout Revenge follows former Professor Phil Philemon as he and his friends continue to seek elusive justice for victims who may not have been able to speak for themselves. Lurking in chat rooms, the group finds a large number of women who have been sexually harassed on the job. Sexually harassed in horrible ways. Harassed until their jobs, their reputations, and their sanity is on the line. And what they find is that the story of he said-she said is not always one that ends well.
But not everything goes as planned, and soon the four friends need to come to terms with a larger reality, including a crime of arson and an FBI investigation.

Found on Amazon 
 

Roundabout Revenge

Round about revenge
By Robert Archibald

A conflict between what is legal and what is just…
Phil Philemon has it good—he enjoys teaching history at a university and is happily married. In fact, he and Mary Jane have been married for decades. After returning from a business trip, he stands in the airport waiting for his wife to pick him up.
She never arrives.
The police tell him that her death was instant, and she never knew what hit her. Phil is devastated. She had been the love of his life, and suddenly she was gone. All because of one person. Then he discovers more details about her death and the man who killed her, but justice is elusive. So Phil takes matters into his own hands and avenges her death the only way he can… with Roundabout Revenge.

Found on Amazon 
 

Who Dung It?

Who dung it
By Robert Archibald

George isn’t certain how he became a dung beetle—or scarab, as he prefers to be called. All he knows is that after he was murdered, this is his new incarnation.
And since dung beetles don’t have opposable thumbs, he enlists the help of Judy, a travel writer working on a piece in Africa to help him track his killer. Her luggage tag address says she is from Cleveland, his hometown, so he grabs the opportunity to go home and fix things. Soon, George and Judy figure out a way to communicate and she agrees to help him find his murderer.
But this is no simple homicide. When George was alive as a man, he worked for a detective agency. What had he uncovered that would cause someone to kill him? And will Judy and her friends have the same fate?

Found on Amazon 
 

The Obsession

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BY DAWN BROTHERTON

When the phone calls began in the dead of the night, Jackie chalked them up to a prank caller.  She had had her share of harassment coming up the ranks of the Air Force and shrugged them off.  Then she began noticing changes in her home that she had not made, unsigned love letters began arriving, and she knew she needed to worry.  Was she paranoid, going crazy, or were men at work not getting the message that she wasn’t interested?

In the neighboring town of Sedalia, a more ominous situation was afoot.  The unexplained death of yet another young, single woman had the police on alert.  Same MO, different small town.  It was only a matter of time before the killer found his next victim.

Dawn Brotherton‘s The Obsession plunges the reader into a tale of suspense and mystery.  Brotherton’s military career as a missile crew member and officer provides the backdrop for her book…resulting in an intimate and authentic portrait of a strong heroine determined to find and stop her stalker.  The Obsession is a compelling read that pits the hunter versus the hunted and page by page leads to a riveting finale.” –Tj O’Connor, Author of the Gumshoe Ghost series.

http://www.blue-dragon-publishing.com
twitter @dmbrotherton

 

Wind the Clock

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BY DAWN BROTHERTON
LAWRENCE STUTZRIEM


Bathed in the beauty of Germany on a storybook assignment, Major Jackie Austin is revered across Spangdahlem Air Base as an officer and leader. The Air Force is looking to promote her ahead of the pack. From the outside, she’s got it all, to include a fighter pilot husband, the handsome and popular Stan “Mace” Mason. In truth, things are fraying behind the scenes, as the compromises of a two-career military marriage take their toll. All of it factors into the greatest tragedy Jackie will ever experience, yet she’ll have no time to heal. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations’ lead investigator Chris Marquette has her locked in his sights. Only Jackie Austin can save herself, even if it means walking straight into a den of terrorists.

http://www.blue-dragon-publishing.com
twitter @dmbrotherton

 

Tough as Marshmallows

Pam crouch tough as marshmallows
By Pamela Crouch

A sweet story with a dark twist.
He knew he have to have her when she pulled into the South Carolina gas station.
Marsha thinks time is on her side.
He knows it isn’t.
A young widow, she discovers her heritage and gains a renewed sense of purpose while restoring her estranged grandparent’s house.
But he is watching.
Can she escape her dark fate? Or, will hers be the next body found?

Available on Amazon 
 

A Knife in the Fog

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By Bradley Harper

Jack the Ripper meets Sherlock Holmes’ Arthur Conan Doyle Crime/Mystery Fiction

Physician Arthur Conan Doyle is invited to take a break from his practice to assist London police in tracking down Jack the Ripper. Doyle agrees, with the stipulation his old professor of surgery, Dr. Joseph Bell––Doyle’s inspiration for Sherlock Holmes––agrees to work with him. Soon the two are joined by Margaret Harkness, an author who knows how to use a Derringer as well as she knows the dank alleys and courtyards of the East End where she resides. Pursuing leads through London and Whitechapel becomes infinitely more dangerous for the trio when the hunters become the hunted in this adventurous debut novel and series starter.

WINNER – 2019 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion for Best Mystery Novel FINALIST – 2019 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Wards for Best First Novel by an American Author

https://bharperauthor.com/
https://www.fountainbookstore.com/bradleyharper
 

Queens Gambit

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By Bradley Harper

The adventure continues with Margaret Harkness racing to save the Queen of England herself.

Spring, 1897. London. A letter arrives from Margaret Harkness from her old friend Professor Bell, her old comrade in the hunt for Jack the Ripper and the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Homes. Bell invites her to join him in Germany on a mysterious mission for the German government involving the loss of state secrets to Anarchists. The resolution of this commission leads to Margaret being stalked through the streets of London by a vengeful man armed with a powerful and nearly silent air rifle who has both Margaret and Queen Victoria in his sights. The hunt is on, but who is the hunter, and who the hunted as the day approaches for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.


https://bharperauthor.com/
https://www.fountainbookstore.com/bradleyharper
 

Deception– A Sidney Lake Lowcountry Mystery

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By Tim Holland


When Sidney Lake learned the author's copy of Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had been stolen, he firmly believed he would never see it again, much less hold it in his hands. But there it was. In the hands of an appraiser at the National Arts And Crafts Show. Could it be the same three-volume first edition of the book? He had to find out. Assembling his experienced team of investigators, they begin searching for the appraiser, who is believed to be from Savannah, Georgia, in the hope of being led to the young man who claimed to be the owner of the book. But before they get fully underway, Tillie James, his Gullah companion, and confidant drops out of the group as a ninety-year-old Gullah woman is threatened with losing her home at a delinquent tax sale. The woman had been deceptively tricked by a real estate attorney into not paying the tax claiming he had a way around it. Could there be a connection between rare book thefts and attempts to steal land from Gullah residents of the Pirate Islands? Sidney and his associates decide to pursue both the tax fraud deception and the possible Brontë book forgery at the same time and keep running into coincidences. But are they? The Lowcountry of South Carolina takes center stage as Sidney Lake and Tillie James pursue the answers to questions not everyone wants asked.

Available on Amazon

The Rising Tide –A Sidney Lake Lowcountry Mystery

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By Tim Holland

Midsummer in the lowcountry of South Carolina is a dreamy, quiet time. Professor Sidney Lake uses this respite for literary research and planning his next semester, but his Gullah housekeeper, Tillie James, has other plans for him. She needs his help in dealing with a touchy subject: the death of George Reed and the suspicions it aroused that his wife Becky was involved, even though the coroner and the police chief declared Reed’s death an unfortunate accident. As the police are in the business of catching the guilty and have no interest in proving someone innocent, it’s up to Sidney Lake and Tillie, along with his graduate assistant, the local minister and a retired policeman, to save Becky Reeds reputation. The proof of her innocence seems to rest on the quirks of the rising and falling tide in the marsh where George died. But the search for truth turns out to be more than Sidney bargained for and, suddenly, his life and those of his friends are on the line.
Available at Barnes and Noble.

What the Mirror Doesn't See

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By Tim Holland

It is 1993, the banking world is in turmoil, and in New Jersey there is outright panic. The big New York banks and emerging regionals are gobbling up everything in the state. Every financial institution is now both predator and prey. The Fed has opened the floodgates, and traditional banking ethics are disappearing. At a used book sale, Jim Fairmont, a career banker having worked for First State Bank for more than twenty-five years, finds a blank, signed invoice belonging to an auto parts supplier. The document is contained in a box of books donated by Larry McBride, a new-breed, brash, thirty-three-year-old former New York banker. McBride had been hired by First State Bank to give it credibility in its defensive entry into international banking and who, like Jim, is an avid book collector. Alerted by McBride’s strange behavior at the book sale as he searched for something, which Jim suspects was the invoice, Jim begins to investigate McBride’s relationships with some of First States customers. What he uncovers is much bigger than he ever imagined, involving clearly unethical conduct and questionable international asset movements. His discoveries put him in the sights of New Jersey’s underworld who are determined to protect McBride and his clients, placing not only Jim’s life in danger, but those of his close associates as well.

Available at Barnes and Noble.

ElderHouse

Elderhouse
By Ronald Munro

(Syd Brogan Crime Drama Book 1)

It was a mystery what she was doing in that courtyard. A wicked winter storm raging with fierce winds made it highly improbable. She hated the cold. Yet, that’s where her slain body was found dressed only in nightclothes.

Was she forced into it? Coerced? Lured? Pursued?

The blunt force trauma was clear. Not so, the motive. The victim had no enemies. She wasn’t violated. Nothing was stolen. She was just murdered.

Detective Cynthia “Syd” Brogan has to wonder how a quiet woman living a quiet life meets a violent death in a peaceful community of senior citizens.

Was it a mistake, or was it a meticulous crime fashioned by a disturbed mind? Perhaps it was jealousy or greed? Could it have been revenge?

It’s hard to tell when the circumstances are distorted by a tangled history of disconnected motives stretching forty years into the past.

Available on Amazon

Song of the Weeping Copse

Song of the weeping copse
By Ronald Munro

(Syd Brogan Crime Drama Book 2)

Sometimes a case is so intimate, so much a part of you, it follows you, seeks you out, beckons to you, then it draws you away into its own world.

“He called them his Forces of Discontent, all those sources of fragmented violence waiting to be harnessed... The dissidents, the abused, the abandoned, and the disgruntled.”

All he lacked was a day of reckoning, and now he had it. Like a gift from the gods of anarchy, a vow of blood vengeance against the government opens a pathway to the destruction of the American heartland.

To thwart it, Detective Syd Brogan must abandon the world of civil laws and let herself be drawn into a remote enclave where repression is law and vengeance is justice.

It’s a desperate measure for a desperate time. So, too, are its desperate consequences.

Available on Amazon 

Neptune's Watch

Neptunes watch
By Ronald Munro

(Syd Brogan Crime Drama Book 3)

A year after a traumatic injury, Detective Cynthia “Syd” Brogan has been cleared for duty. Flashbacks, though, still haunt her. While investigating the death of a drunken vagrant, Brogan confronts a mysterious “emperor of the homeless” and uncovers a heinous crime threatening decades of disaster. No one believes her. Even as dying vagrants, a Biblical plague, and a terrorist threat rock the peaceful community of Virginia Beach, Brogan is put on modified duty pending psychological review. In this story of the triumph of courage over fear, Brogan defies her orders and risks more than her career to stop the terror.

Available on Amazon

Shadows of Malice and Mercy

Shadows of malice
By Ronald Munro

(Syd Brogan Crime Drama Book 4)

Detective Cynthia “Syd” Brogan joins forces with the FBI in a case of kidnapping, domestic abuse, and attempted murder. Soon, she’s in a wilderness, tracking a shooter, not waiting for backup.

But something strange happened out there when two tortured spirits clashed in a fleeting struggle of life and death.

Syd Brogan had battled her demons for more than a year. They called it PTSD. When she brought down terrorist Nils Palmer, their voices were muted, but not silenced. Other forces kept them alive.

Stanley Brooks had demons, too. Driven by his abusive personality, he fantasized a life of dominance over his wife and child and his coworkers. But his work and home lives crashed in failure, and he turned to kidnapping and attempted murder to appease his cravings.

It may well have been Fate, then, that compelled Brogan to track Brooks into an ancient primordial swamp, because in that “vast Body of mire and Nastiness,” demons were fated to die.

Available on Amazon 

Dangerous Hearts

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By Mary Montague Sikes

Novella - Her life in jeopardy, Caroline escapes from Richmond, Virginia and heads to a house she owns in South Carolina that is the secret hiding place for the royal cross necklace. But danger follows her home and so does Rob. When he appears, the necklace disappears making Caroline suspect Rob. Still, with no one else to turn to, she must trust him. Is that trust a mistake? Together, can they retrieve her precious family heirloom? Can Caroline escape the stalker who has followed her to South Carolina?

Jungle Jeopardy

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By Mary Montague Sikes

When Dana Sinclair realizes Clifton Wilder is missing, she takes off for Costa Rica to search for him. An apparent kidnapping turns into a jungle adventure that leads Dana and Clifton into the wilds of Guatemala where they discover an unexplored Maya cave and find pottery and walls covered with glyphs. Tyler Hunter wants to save Dana’s sister, Rebecca, from prison, and to do so, he needs for them to find her grandfather’s hidden treasure. An archaeologist on sabbatical in the Caribbean, Tyler intrigues Dana with his knowledge of the Maya. Dana has never doubted her sister’s guilt in the murder of their grandfather on the island of Antigua, but now an element of doubt begins to creep in.

Secrets by the Sea

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By Mary Montague Sikes

"Passenger to Paradise" gothic mystery/romance set on the island of Antigua.

The First Stone

The first stone
By Lynn Underwood 

Second EditionSometimes when you try to bury your secrets they claw their way back. In The First Stone, generations of deceit and betrayal find their way to one family. This epic novel begins in 1919 and ends in 2004 covers the power of redemption and the lesson of forgiveness. “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”What other readers are saying about The First Stone: Generations are haunted by decisions and guilt, but a tangled web connects them in their humanity and for some, absolution.Susan Williamson A story about the weight of vengeance and the need for redemption, The First Stone admirably intersects the lives of very diverse and unlikely characters. When the complexity of the war in Viet Nam collides with immigrants from Mexico struggling to find their place, the tension carries the reader through the struggles of finding one’s moral compass.Michael Schiretti A deeply moving, sunny novel, full of humanity Clement BrownWith his Southwest heritage, Lynn Underwood writes like Tony Hillerman with a civil engineering degree. Ed Sawdorski

Available on Amazon

High Rise

High rise by lu
By Lynn Underwood 
 
When a building inspector is pushed off the twenty-third floor of Burj Norfolk, the incident threatens to ruin Zachary Martin's construction company, known for its spotless safety record. Did Lawrence Newton act alone or has widespread corruption infiltrated the project?

Lynn Underwood's thirty-four years as a Building Official shine through this intriguing tale set in the world of construction. Readers of Underwood's The First Stone will be delighted by the return of Padre Juan for a mystical surprise ending.
What readers like you are saying about High Rise:

The saga continues in Lynn Underwood’s second novel, High Rise. As if ripped from the headlines, this story of greed, corruption and the consequences of shoddy building practices culminate in disaster for his characters. A great read!
David Cariens, Author
Escaping Madness Alcoholism - Mental Illness - Murder

High Rise is a carefully crafted and realistic view of the relationship between a black man and a white woman. It captures the essence of how black men are forced to navigate work differently when the relationship is black/white vs black/black. The amplification of racial differences in Underwood’s second novel can help guide meaningful discussions that steer us toward better understanding of racism in all its disguises.

Cyrus Cormier

Buy it fast, read it slowly. High Rise is a major event ... a clear message how to create value in the world - in the way we see ourselves.

Imad Eldurubi
Fellow Chartered Building Engineer Affiliate
Royal Institute of British Architects
Available on Amazon

Dead in the Loft

Dead in the loft
BY SUSAN WILLIAMSON
 
Molly likes her job at the new farm… for the most part. But finding a dead man in the loft could change everything. Who is this man, and how did he die? Then the discovery of yet another body makes everything more complicated, and Molly can’t stop herself from looking into things as the body count piles up.
With the delivery of horses that may or may not be legal and the appearance of animal rights activists intent on doing damage, Molly has her hands full. Clearly, though, her first priority is stopping a killer, as Molly has become the next targets. With lives on the line, including her own, Molly holds onto the reins as she chases down a murderer determined to destroy everything she has.
 
Available from Amazon

Dead on the Trail

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BY SUSAN WILLIAMSON
 
 Molly Lewis has just finished a grueling day at the barn with no help when a trail ride along the Broad River brings her to a body in the woods.  --One that was trouble alive and bound to be more trouble dead--for Molly and everyone concerned.
 
Available from Amazon, Indigo Sea Press  and susanwilliamsonnc@gmail.com

Desert Tail

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BY SUSAN WILLIAMSON
 
Madelaine Jones is still reeling from her husband's death in Afghanistan when her house explodes and a mysterious letter indicates her husband might not have been a war casualty. Her desire to know the truth puts Madelaine and her loved ones in danger as she searches three continents for answers.
 
Available from Amazon and susanwilliamsonnc@gmail.com

 

Tangled Tail

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By Susan Williamson

Madelaine Jones is trying to reorder her life after discovering the truth of her husband’s death overseas. She is remodeling a home and working to foster a young victim of human trafficking when her friend Irish Garda Commander Peter Simon asks for her help in a case of smuggling via horse. The smuggling is just beginning of this case of international intrigue and news planting.


Available at Amazon.