Women Craft

After the death of her beloved grandmother, Alex Bailey’s life is left in tatters. As she struggles to stitch things back together, she takes solace in one final gift - a cruise - booked before the quilting matriarch's death. To weave the quilting community back together, Alex convinces her friends on Spruce Street to join her on the cruise. With all hands on deck, a mysterious quilt and an unknown destination, she must trust that everything will go according to the plan. Until a death onboard the Tranquility puts a wrinkle in Alex’s idyllic quilting vacation.

History is filled with stories of women accused of witchcraft, of fearsome girls with arcane knowledge. Toil & Trouble features 15 stories of girls embracing their power, reclaiming their destinies, and using their magic to create, to curse, to cure - and to kill.

In the port of Charleston, South Carolina, post-Revolutionary War passions reach fever pitch. There, Lilyan's past catches up with her. As a former patriot spy, she is charged with the murder of a British officer. Thrown into the "Exchange Building" and chained alongside prostitutes, thieves, and murderers, she seeks the courage to survive and the faith to believe she will find her missing child, Laurel. Determined to free his wife at any cost, Nicholas finds himself forced back into a life of violence.

Trouble is blowing up all over Hoochville. In the aftermath of the Founder’s Day parade explosion, weird things keep happening that parallel events in Deana Marie’s new unpublished whodunit. Coincidence? Sadie doesn’t think so. And when a body turns up in the storage shed at River Rats Tavern, all eyes are on Deana Marie as the source of all the shenanigans. While Sadie’s focus is on finding Deana Marie’s manuscript copycat, most everyone else in town is too enamored with Hoochville’s new roller derby team, the Intoxiskaters, to even care.

Fresh off her engagement and still basking in the glow of new love, Ellie Rockwell should be focused on wedding plans. Instead, she and daughter Evie find themselves knee-deep in adorable kittens as Silver Circle tackles kitten season in Tablerock, Texas. But wedding catalogs and bottle-feeding schedules take a back seat when local artisan Penelope Periwinkle is discovered murdered among her handcrafted items at the town's annual Crafts and Creations Festival.

A highlight of Savannah's new glass bead workshop is a technique called flame-working, which requires the careful wielding of acetylene torches. Understandably, safety is a top priority. But as Savannah is ensuring her students' safety inside, a hit-and-run driver strikes down a pedestrian outside her shop.

After graduating from Atlanta University, Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933) began a lifelong career as an educator and the founder of numerous institutions for the upliftment of freedmen and their children. In 1883 she founded the first school for black children in Augusta, Georgia. She was principal of the Haines Institute for Industrial and Normal Education for 50 years.

The Craft Fair may have hit a few snags lately, but knitting enthusiast Lia Geiger is hopeful her quiet life will return to its usual patterns in no time. Her daughter has officially moved back home, and sure, the house is a little crowded with Hayley’s take-home work from the alpaca farm, but that’s a price Lia will happily pay for being a close-knit family. All seems well until Cori Littlefield, a new vendor with a gift for crochet, is found dead, sending shock waves through all of Crandalsburg.

For once things seem to be running smoothly for knitting enthusiast Lia Geiger. Her daughter is living on her own and happy with her new job on the alpaca farm. Plus, Lia and her Ninth Street Knitters have been knitting for the Civil War reenactment being held on the grounds next to the Crandalsburg Craft Fair. It’s all fun and battle games until one of the “injured soldiers” turns out to be the very real victim of a murder, and Lia’s friend and neighbor falls under deep suspicion.

Cleo Mack's life has been a whirlwind since she inadvertently became the executive director of Harbor Village, a retirement community bustling with energetic seniors. Juggling apartment sales, quirky residents, and a fast-moving romance is tricky business. But on-the-job stress develops a new meaning when Twinkle Thaw, a portrait artist known to ruffle a few feathers, arrives unannounced for the weekend's festival and drops dead hours later - mysteriously poisoned.... Twinkle's bizarre death doesn't seem like an accident.

When the town council hires Chloe Abbington's close friend, famous wall muralist Lana Easton, to paint a mural advertising the return of the floating amphitheater, not everyone in Whisper Cove is happy about the theater or Lana. Naysayers think the noise from concerts and visitors will disrupt their quiet community. It doesn't help that a lot of money taken from the town's budget is being used to pay the muralist for her services. The mood turns even more grim when Lana is found dead, and since Chloe was there alone to discover her body, that makes her the prime suspect.

There are two sides to every divorce . . . yours and the jerk's. In this case, there's Clancy's side and then there's the JERK's side. Of course, Kiki sides with Clancy because they're BFFs (Best Friends Forever). As for the JERK, well, the poor guy can't make up his mind.

An epidemic of teenage suicides leaves a rural community grieving—and the death toll keeps rising. Can Kiki go undercover as an art teacher at a local high school to help? To clear her calendar, Kiki must juggle multiple obligations and make a tough decision: Can she trust her in-laws (including her alcoholic mother-in-law) to take an out-of-state vacation with her kids? To make everything work, Kiki must move in with her OTHER mother-in-law and that's enough to make Kiki want to commit suicide. Once in place, Kiki suspects these are not just copycat deaths. There's another dynamic at work.

Meet Fleck Parker: Mother, Crafter and Amateur Detective. Fleck loves a good puzzle. She spends most of her time feeling invisible, caring for three small children and that's fine, really. But it does make her brain itch occasionally. When Trixie, fellow school-mum and avid crafter, is accused of stealing money from Many Hands, the women's charity known for its charming store full of handmade crafts, Fleck feels compelled to investigate and clear Trixie's name.

For someone whose greatest culinary skill is ordering takeout, Sarah never expected to be co-owner of a restaurant. But while Sarah and her twin sister, Chef Emily, are tangled up in red tape, an attention-stealing new establishment - run by none other than Sarah's late ex-husband's mistress, Jane - is having its grand opening across the street. Jane's new sous chef, Riley Miller, is the talk of Wheaton with her delicious vegan specialties. Then Riley is found dead outside the restaurant with Sarah's friend, Jacob, kneeling over her.

Kiki is eight months pregnant and trying to cram as much ho-ho-ho into the holidays as possible. When a customer drops dead during an offsite event, this intrepid scrapbooking sleuth is left holding the bag. After her name is cleared, Kiki isn't one to sit around while her friends are threatened with false imprisonment. Instead, she vows to wrap up this case and tie it with a bow. Leave it to Kiki to determine who was nice, and who was very, very naughty, indeed. A nasty Christmas Grinch is targeting one of Kiki's friends—and that's just not kosher.

What if you could still work at home, but have a personal area that’s professional, well-appointed, and not easily accessible to your curious kids? With your own shipping container workspace, separating work and home life is possible even if you work from home.

Maeve is a journalist by day, aspiring romance writer by night, and hopeless crossword addict the rest of the time. She finds a set of odd clues in her favorite daily puzzle created by the mysterious cruciverbalist Q Marks. The clues lead her to believe that Q might have murdered a local professor and gotten away with it! With such scant evidence, police help isn’t likely, so Maeve must use her strengths as a writer, reporter, and puzzler to find Q. That is unless Q Marks finds her first.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, better known as "Henrie O", has experienced much sadness and loss in her life - yet nothing more tragic than the sudden death six years ago of her husband, Richard, on Kauai. Then, on a brisk March morning, a package arrives by courier that shatters her fragile peace of mind - a chilling message that claims Richard's fatal fall from a towering island cliff was no accident. It was murder. It is news that enrages the normally self-contained Henrie O, and creates a summons she cannot ignore.

Chloe Abbington and her sister, Izzie, are enjoying huge success running Paint with a View, their paint party business in the tranquil western New York lakeside town of Whisper Cove. Now, their aunt Constance—president of the local chapter of the Chautauqua Sisterhood—has hooked them up with a gig hosting a Halloween painting party. The guests will be painting a local ghost legend, the Lady of Chautauqua Lake, who died a hundred years earlier and rises from the lake every October to haunt anyone who dares venture out on All Hallows’ Eve.