Cozy Mysteries California

A singer silenced. The fate of St. Mo's Amusement pier is rocked by political waves. Can Twizzie unmask the killer and save her home? Tommy Neptune was the hit of the show, his voice the best they'd ever heard. When Twiz and Chaz discover the star of the new musical dead, Twiz finds herself following the tune of another mystery. The death is just another note in Star Sinclair's samba about the town's biggest eyesore. The town council's chairperson hasn't given up her plans to destroy the town's amusement pier.

Vinnie Callabrese toils in the mean world of a Mafia hood, violently enforcing his loan-shark boss's debt collections, but he lives in the world of the movies, one where he can tie a bow tie like Cary Grant and speak with the voice of Tyrone Power. Vinnie is smart, too, and he finds a way to...

A girl with a canister of pepper spray. A guy with an odd recurring dream. A tiny colony of nervous California sea lions. They all come together in Dana Point Harbor.

Tom Treadwell is a cross-dressing West Hollywood P.I. with a passion for frilly underwear, big bouffant hair, and four-inch stilettos. Often referred to as Laverne when in the company of those who know him best. He has a parrot for a partner, a senior citizen for a secretary, a new girlfriend who engages in phone sex in order to pay for acting lessons. And a Scandinavian porn star as a former client, whose ex has just turned up dead with a bullet in his skull, for which Tom's been named the primary suspect for a crime he didn't commit.

""HBO's Silicon Valley meets The Big Sleep"" (Mark Maskell Smith): A hilarious neo-noir send-up of Silicon Valley, penned by an anonymous insider. “DOES FOR SILICON VALLEY WHAT CARL HIAASEN DID FOR FLORIDA.” —Tim Dorsey “THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T DIE IS DASHIELL HAMMETT 2.0: THE CLASSIC...

A haunting debut literary noir about a former pastor’s search to find a missing woman in the toxic, contradictory underbelly of southern California. “He was finished with church, with God, with all of it. But to find the girl, he has to go back.” In Mark Haines’s former life, he was an...

New York Times bestselling author Faye Kellerman spins a gripping tale of a modern-day nightmare that ensnares L.A. Homicide Detective Peter Decker and his wife Rina Lazarus in a web of secrets and murder. A small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building...

Southern California is where dreams come true—or so Scarlett Gardner thought. When she moved there and opened the Palm Trees and Page Turners bookshop, she thought her boyfriend and business partner would be part of the story. When he leaves her for a better job, Scarlett finds herself struggling to keep her new business afloat. And that’s not the only thing she has to worry about—she discovers something underneath the pier by her bookshop that she didn’t outline for her life’s story: the dead body of a book-buying customer.

Maggie McDonald has a penchant for order that isn't confined to her clients' closets, kitchens, and sock drawers. As she lays out her plan to transfer her family to the 100-year-old house her husband Max has inherited in the hills above Silicon Valley, she has every expectation for their new life to fall neatly into place. But as the family bounces up the driveway of their new home, she's shocked to discover the house's dilapidated condition. When her husband finds the caretaker face-down in their new basement, it's the detectives who end up moving in.

A Hollywood starlet found floating in the bay. St. Mo's pier is still destined for the scrap heap. Can Twiz unbend the mystery, and weather the storm that is brewing? Twiz’s simple Sunday morning of reading on the pier is interrupted with the discovery of the starlet's body. Several of the actor’s enemies are right here in St. Maurice. They all have a motive, but who actually shot the movie star in the back?

The #1 New York Times bestselling author and Queen of Suspense launched her career with this “indescribably suspenseful” (San Francisco Chronicle) classic thriller following a woman whose past holds a terrible secret. Nancy Harmon long ago fled the heartbreak of her first marriage, the...

The notes are signed Admirer. At first respectful, they become increasingly bizarre and are accompanied by roses, then other, more macabre offerings. Chris Calloway, a rising young Hollywood actress, finds the letters irritating, then frightening, but when a freak accident takes away her sight...