Showing results by author "Kathleen Bridge" in All Categories

It's been quite a year for novelist Liz Holt. She's overcome a lot and is finally feeling at peace with her new life at her family's hotel, the Indialantic by the Sea, on the beautiful barrier island of Melbourne Beach, Florida. She's exactly where she needs to be to ring in the New Year at the Florida Writes Literary Masquerade Ball.

Trading the urban sprawl of Manhattan for the tranquility and exotic beauty of a Florida barrier island was the best decision author Liz Holt ever made. What could be more ideal for relaxing, regrouping, and getting a writer's creative juices flowing than observing life at the unconventional hotel that has been in Liz's family for generations? But it's death that grips the island when a body sweeps in on the tide....

The Indialantic by the Sea Hotel has a 100-year-old history on beautiful Melbourne Beach, Florida, and more than a few guests seem to have been there from the start. When Liz Holt returns home after an intense decade in New York, she's happy to be surrounded by the eccentric clientele and loving relatives that populate her family-run inn. But that patronage decreases by one when a filthy rich guest is discovered dead in her oceanfront suite.

The first Sag Harbor Antiquarian Book and Ephemera Fair is right around the corner, and interior designer Meg Barrett has her hands full decorating rooms at the Bibliophile Bed & Breakfast for wealthy rare book collector Franklin Hollingsworth. Rumor has it Hollingsworth is in possession of an unpublished manuscript written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When the Fitzgerald manuscript's authenticator is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, Meg suspects a killer is on the loose.

Island life can get pretty weird. Wiccan weddings, psychic brides, mermaid parades, eccentric parrots...novelist Liz Holt has gotten used to it since moving back to the barrier island of Melbourne Beach, Florida, and once again working in her family's hotel and emporium, the Indialantic by the Sea. But one thing she'll never get used to is murder.

In between scouring estate sales for her new interior design business, Cottages by the Sea, Meg Barrett visits the swanky East Hampton home of her old college roommate, Jillian Spenser. But instead of seeing how the other half lives, she learns how the other half dies. Jillian's mother, known as the Queen Mother of the Hamptons, has been murdered. Someone has staged a coup.

To keep her mind off the legal battle over the oceanfront cottage she's trying to buy, Meg Barrett agrees to help her friend inventory and clear out furniture from the massive Montauk estate of wealthy art broker Harrison Falks. But the job takes a terrifying turn when Meg discovers a skeleton in a hidden room in one of the estate's many bungalows. The remains turn out to be those of Harrison's son, who went missing nearly 20 years ago - along with one of his father's Warhol paintings.

As shooting concludes on the season finale of the TV mystery Mr. & Mrs. Winslow, interior decorator and set designer Meg Barrett can feel the hostility in the air. The show's new director had already alienated the entire cast and crew, and now Meg's boyfriend, Patrick, was ready to throttle him for taking liberties with the script. Meg thought the director was a very lucky man to have gotten out of there in one piece—until a few nights later when she stumbles over his dead body.

When decorator Meg Barrett travels to a remote mansion to help select period pieces for a new 1930s-style television mystery series, she's chilled to learn that the manor was once a mental asylum and the site of a mysterious decades-old murder. And when a fierce blizzard knocks out the power and strands Meg and her cohorts in the home's rickety old elevator, they emerge to discover that another person has been murdered—in the same macabre manner as the original victim.

Tensions are high on the eve of the grand opening of Prive, an exclusive gourmet dining club that interior designer Meg Barrett played a large part in decorating. With just the well-heeled owners, the kitchen staff, and Meg gathered for the pre-opening feast, it seems that everyone in the small group is airing their grievances, with their most venomous attacks directed at the notorious sous chef.

Montauk's first annual Designer Showhouse was meant to be a collaborative event, so decorator Meg Barrett can only despair at the group of cutthroat designers scheming to sabotage each other on the project, not to mention the oddball collection of ghost hunters slinking around to investigate a supposedly haunted cottage. But when one of the owners of the showhouse is found murdered on the rocky beach below, Meg suddenly finds herself clashing with local police because of evidence that points to her as a prime suspect.