Showing results by narrator "Dina Pearlman" in All Categories

Lyla Moody and her book club, the Jane Does, are hosting a Halloween party at Magnolia Manor, tailored after Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced, but when the lights come on after the staged murder, a real victim lies dead from a gunshot wound in her chest. The victim was an estranged relative of Elaine Morgan, operator of the B&B, who’d earlier been seen arguing with her about the fate of the property. Suspicion immediately falls on Elaine, and she’s arrested.

Lillian Byrd has been searching her soul after the gut-wrenching experience of killing someone in self-defense. Scrabbling to make ends meet, she takes a job as a quasi-detective, solving life's little mysteries for a pair of eccentric women in one of Detroit's last prestigious neighborhoods. When she spots a corpse on the next-door lawn, she jumps back into honest work as an investigative journalist.

Once again Lillian Byrd is down on her luck, strumming her mandolin for spare quarters alongside Blind Lonnie, Detroit's resident blues guitarist. But a chance encounter with her childhood friend Duane is about to completely capsize her life. One summer night when Lillian was twelve, flames ripped through the Polka Dot, a bar owned and run by her parents. Three bodies were found in the ashes: those of her mother, her father, and the barmaid, Trix Hawley. Or so Lillian has always thought. But when Lillian and Duane put their stories together, the past erupts into a wild enigma.

Lillian Byrd is a small-time reporter with a flair for making big-time mistakes—like getting fired for fending off the boss's son with an X-Acto knife and breaking up with her girlfriend for no good reason—so her investigation into the disappearances of women in the Detroit area might not be the best idea. But when one of the missing women turns up dead and Lillian recognizes the bizarrely mutilated corpse, she's in too deep to get out.