Résultats de "Charlotte MacLeod" dans Toutes les catégories

In a quiet small town in New Brunswick, old Agatha Treadway makes one last cranky complaint to her niece before dying on her kitchen floor. The cause seems to be a jar of contaminated string beans, which sat on Agatha's basement shelf for years before becoming her final meal. The town doctor calls it a tragic accident - and a warning to all who can their own vegetables - but Agatha's neighbor, the intrepid Janet Wadman, knows better. Agatha was an expert canner, which means the beans must have been placed there by someone else. This was murder.

Each December, the faculty of Balaclava Agricultural College goes wild with holiday decorations. The entire campus glitters with Christmas lights, save for one dark spot: the home of Professor Peter Shandy. But after years of resisting the school's Illumination festival, Shandy suddenly snaps, installing a million-watt display of flashing lights and blaring music perfectly calculated to drive his neighbors mad. Then the horticulturalist flees town, planning to spend Christmas on a tramp steamer. He returns home to find his lights extinguished - and a dead librarian in his living room.

Peace on Earth isn’t everyone’s cup of tea in Charlotte MacLeod’s “A Cozy for Christmas”. Peter Lovesey’s “The Haunted Crescent” delivers a holiday ghost story with a twist. A training session for department-store Santas turns up Saint Nicks who are anything but angels in Isaac Asimov’s “Ho, Ho, Ho”. Marcia Muller’s “Silent Night” finds a tough private investigator searching San Francisco’s Tenderloin district - and discovering something unexpected.

According to Max Bittersohn, he and Sarah Kelling have witnessed enough murder and unhappiness, so it's high time they got married. And though Sarah hasn't yet agreed to such drastic measures, she invites Max to summer with her at Ireson's Landing. But they haven't been in the house ten minutes when they stumble upon summer's first mystery - a mint-condition, antique Spanish mirror that is tremendously rare and valuable.

It has only been a few months since Sarah Kelling's elderly husband passed away, and she is struggling to adapt to life as a penniless young widow. To make ends meet, she converts her stately Boston home into a boardinghouse, a decision that brings something even better than money: the company of art-fraud-investigator Max Bittersohn. The budding couple is standing on a balcony, recovering from a second-rate concert at a third-rate museum, when something plummets past them. The museum has been robbed, and a guard has fallen to his death.

Newlyweds Peter and Helen Shandy are picking out flatware when a pair of gun-toting hooligans burst into the silversmith's shop, empty the safe, and leave with Helen as their hostage. Although the police recover Helen quickly, her professor husband is badly shaken by the ordeal. Early the next morning, the college's head of animal husbandry frantically reports another hostage situation in progress. Belinda, the school's beloved sow, has been kidnapped, and only Peter can bring home the bacon.

The weather vanes of the famous craftsman Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes.

Although he is a decorated officer of the Mounted Police, Madoc Rhys' tin ear has long been an embarrassment to his musically fixated family. But when his father's orchestra needs a policeman, the Mountie gets a chance to make daddy proud. It began as pranks among the brass instruments, but something is rotten inside the Wagstaffe Symphony, and is about to graduate to something criminal. Called in to look into the tensions within the group, Madoc arrives just in time to see the French horn player keel over.

An unpleasant man in every respect, university Professor Herbert Ungley is exceedingly vain. One morning, his landlady catches her cat coming in with Ungley's hairpiece between its teeth. It's clear something has happened to the old grouch, because he would never be caught without his toupee. Ungley is found in the yard behind his social club, with his head bashed in and his baldness plain for the world to see. Although the police are content to call it an accident, sleuthing horticulturalist Peter Shandy is unconvinced and finds there are too many unanswered questions.

When 105-year-old Hilda Horsefall tells young reporter Cronkite Swope of a stone carved with Norse runes that once sat in the nearby woods, the writer starts salivating at the thought of breaking the news that Vikings once marauded through their sleepy Massachusetts countryside. But while he's jotting down notes, a scream rings out, and Cronkite finds an even bigger story. A farmhand has been burned to death by quicklime, and Cronkite gets an exclusive scoop.

Though he may not look the part, Madoc Rhys is a Mountie - and his keen sense of detection tells him it's time to ask Janet Wadman to marry him. They have just gotten engaged when Christmas rolls around, and Janet's boss invites them to his family estate for a last holiday fling before Janet leaves her job. After a long helicopter ride, they are at Graylings, ancestral home of the Condryckes, a family so strange that Canada's shortest Mountie fits right in. There is a psychic old woman, an erudite butler, and a family patriarch.

Though the inheritance from her dearly departed Alexander was meant to set Sarah Kelling up for life, it vanishes quickly in the face of hounding from charitable organizations and the IRS. Facing the loss of her stately Back Bay brownstone, Sarah opens her home to lodgers - deciding she prefers a boardinghouse to the poorhouse. Soon she is cooking meals and serving tea for a cast of quirky residents, a cozy little family that would be quite happy were it not for the unpleasant presence of a certain Barnwell Augustus Quiffen.

The angry old men of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish club celebrate yuletide doing what they do best: eating, drinking, and greeting the season of giving with a spirited "bah, humbug!" Though well past sixty, Jem Kelling is a relative infant compared to some of the club's elder statesmen, and he has waited decades to host their annual Christmas scowl. And during his first evening as Exalted Chowderhead, he is thrilled to find the wine abundant, the chowder superb, and the humbugs as lusty as ever.

Like many old New England families, the Kellings live to die. Although their family vault is spacious and comfortable, it will not do for Sarah Kelling's great-uncle Frederick. In his will, he demands to be buried inside the ancient family tomb at Boston Common, which hasn't admitted a new member in more than a century. But when the Kellings crack the old vault's door, they find a recently built brick wall - and behind it lays a surprisingly fresh corpse, a skeleton with rubies in its teeth.

Though a few years past 60, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma is as vigorous as a girl of 22. She sings, she dances, and when the local fire department needs a fundraising boost, she's happy to jump out a window for charity. This summer, she decamps to Maine, to beat the heat at an island retreat for artists and great thinkers. There are writers, painters, a psychic, and a historian, and their company promises to be great fun - until a few of them go treasure-crazy.

Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn't. Dittany is giving him what-for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill, and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn't the target.

Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn, have made names for themselves tracking down stolen paintings, sculptures, and, when necessary, the occasional murderer. But this is the first time they have been asked to find a missing Rolls Royce. When Bill Billingsgate's prize 1927 New Phantom disappears, they head for his estate on the Massachusetts coast, arriving - to their horror - just in time for Billingsgate's annual Renaissance fair.

Malice Domestic distinguishes the personal and private aspects of crime from the public and impersonal. Our murderers don't kill for the fun of it (serial killers) or for a misguided ideal (assassins and terrorists) or for pay (hired hit men). They only do in people they know and love (or hate).

For all the Kellings' quirks, no other family in Boston is more adept at throwing a wedding. So when Max Bittersohn's wife, Sarah Kelling, offers to organize his nephew's nuptials, Max is smart enough to stay out of her way. But when the art-fraud investigator stumbles onto a family mystery, he is drawn into something far more serious than the question of who will catch the bouquet. Stolen years earlier, the priceless Kelling jewels were last seen in Amsterdam, so how did they end up among the wedding gifts?

Zilla Trott is pouring her cat some chamomile tea when the drifter appears in her kitchen. He is grubby and crude - not at all the kind of person you'd usually find in the pleasant town of Lobelia Falls - but something about him intrigues the aging widow. Perhaps it's his rugged good looks, or the way he seems to come from another time and place. Or perhaps it's the fact that he's been dead for nearly a century.