Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Laurie R. King recently introduced her new novel and new character at The Poisoned Pen. You can order a signed copy of Back to the Garden through the Web Store. https://tinyurl.com/2s3rajt7

Here’s the description of Back to the Garden.

A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life—with potentially fatal consequences—in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.

A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: the Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden.

And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new future, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the home’s past: a human skull, hidden away for decades.

Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate’s young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents—monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye.

Could the skull belong to one of his victims?

To Raquel—a woman who knows all about colorful pasts—the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate’s archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all of its own.

Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate.

But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate that summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob’s brother, Fort.

The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case—before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.

---

Laurie R. King is the award-winning, bestselling author of seventeen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Marinelli, and many acclaimed standalone novels such as Folly, Touchstone, The Bones of Paris, and Lockdown. King is an Edgar Award winner and was also named the 2022 Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Mary Russell mystery.

---

Enjoy the recent event as Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, welcomes Laurie R. King back to the bookstore.

Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, and Patrick Millikin from the bookstore, both welcomed authors Gabino Iglesias and Amina Akhtar for a live event at the bookstore. Iglesias is the author of The Devil Takes You Home, and Akhtar is the author of Kismet. You can find signed copies of both books in the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Millikin discussed Gabino Iglesias The Devil Takes You Home with him. Here’s the description of the book.

From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what’s left of his family—even if it means a descent into violence.Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.

The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

---

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. Iglesias’ nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor, and his reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and the Millions Tournament of Books, and is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle.

---

Here’s the description of Amina Akhtar’s Kismet.

From Amina Akhtar comes a viciously funny thriller about wellness—the smoothies, the secrets, and the deliciously deadly impulses.

Lifelong New Yorker Ronnie Khan never thought she’d leave Queens. She’s not an “aim high, dream big” person—until she meets socialite wellness guru Marley Dewhurst.

Marley isn’t just a visionary; she’s a revelation. Seduced by the fever dream of finding her best self, Ronnie makes for the desert mountains of Sedona, Arizona.

Healing yoga, transcendent hikes, epic juice cleanses…Ronnie consumes her new bougie existence like a fine wine. But is it, really? Or is this whole self-care business a little sour?

When the glam gurus around town start turning up gruesomely murdered, Ronnie has her answer: all is not well in wellness town. As Marley’s blind ambition veers into madness, Ronnie fears for her life.

---

Amina Akhtar is a former fashion writer and editor. Her satirical first novel, #FashionVictim, drew critical acclaim and was covered in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Martha Stewart Living, Entertainment Weekly, Fashionista, Book Riot, CrimeReads, and more.

Akhtar has worked at Vogue, Elle, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, where she was the founding editor of the women’s blog The Cut. She’s written for numerous publications, including Yahoo Style, Fashionista, xoJane, Refinery29, Billboard, and more. She currently lives not too far from the Sedona vortexes.

---

Enjoy The Poisoned Pen event with Gabino Iglesias and Amina Akhtar.

Diana Gabaldon recently hosted AG (Gerry) Riddle on the publication day for his novel, Lost in Time. There are signed copies of Lost in Time, The Poisoned Pen’s Notable New Title for September. You can find the copies in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3pTWzNO

Here’s the description of Lost in Time.

“Amazing! One of the twistiest time-tales I’ve ever read.”
““Diana Gabaldon

“Crichtonesque thrillers don’t come much better than this… Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.”
““Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

From the worldwide bestselling author of Departure and Winter World comes a standalone novel about a father and daughter trying to unravel an intricate murder mystery spread across time—with a jaw-dropping twist.

Control the past.

Save the future.

One morning, Dr. Sam Anderson wakes up to find that the woman he loves has been murdered.

For Sam, the horror is only beginning.

He and his daughter are accused of the crime. The evidence is ironclad. They will be convicted.

And so, to ensure his daughter goes free, Sam does what he must: he confesses.

But in the future, murderers aren’t sent to prison.

Thanks to a machine Sam helped invent, the world’s worst criminals are now sent to the past—approximately 200 million years into the past, to the dawn of the time of the dinosaurs—where they must live out their lives alone, in exile from the human race.

Sam accepts his fate.

But his daughter doesn’t.

Adeline Anderson has already lost her mother to a deadly, unfair disease. She can’t bear to lose her father as well.

So she sets out on a quest to prove him innocent. And to get him back. People around her insist that both are impossible tasks.

But Adeline doesn’t give up. She only works harder.

She soon learns that impossible tasks are her specialty. And that she is made of tougher stuff than she ever imagined.

As she peels back the layers of the mystery that tore her father from this world, Adeline finds more questions than answers. Everyone around her is hiding a secret. But which ones are connected to the murder that exiled her father?

That mystery stretches across the past, present, and future ““ and leads to a revelation that will change everything.

---

A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting and running internet companies before retiring to focus on his true passion: writing fiction. He lives in North Carolina. Visit www.agriddle.com

---

Enjoy Diana Gabaldon’s conversation with A.G. Riddle.

Jincy Willett recently appeared for The Poisoned Pen, hosted by Hannah Morrissey, author of Hello, Transcriber. Jincy Willett’s latest novel is Amy Among the Serial Killers. There will be signed bookplates for Willett’s book. You can order copies through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3TCflGU

Here’s the description of Amy Among the Serial Killers.

Jincy Willett’s beloved characters return in Amy Among the Serial Killers, a wickedly smart and funny take on the thriller genre by one of our most acclaimed literary humorists.

Carla Karolak is doing just fine. Having escaped the clutches of her controlling mother and founded a successful writing retreat in which participants are confined to windowless cells until they hit their daily word count, she lives a comfortable, if solitary, existence. If only her therapist, Toonie, would stop going on about Carla’s nonexistent love life and start addressing her writer’s block, she might be able to make some progress. But then Carla finds Toonie murdered, and suddenly her unfinished memoir is the least of her concerns. Without quite knowing why, she dials an old phone number.

Amy Gallup, retired after decades as a writing instructor, is surprised to hear from her former student Carla out of the blue, three years since they last spoke. She’s even more shocked when she finds out the reason for Carla’s call. Suddenly, she finds herself swept up in a murder investigation that soon brings her old writing group back together. But they’ll need all the help they can get, as one murder leads to another, and suspicions of a serial killer mount across San Diego.

Full of Jincy Willett’s trademark dark humor, an unforgettable cast of characters, and two of the most endearingly imperfect protagonists who have ever attempted to solve a murder, Amy Among the Serial Killers shows us what can be gained when we begin to break down our own walls and let others inside…as long as they aren’t murderers.

---

JINCY WILLETT is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney’s Quarterly and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review.

---

Enjoy the conversation as Jincy Willett and Hannah Morrissey discuss the book and its characters.

Alice Feeney appeared at The Poisoned Pen on release day for Daisy Darker. Barbara Peters, owner of the bookstore, welcomed her and the audience for the event. There are signed copies of Daisy Darker, a Hot Book of the Week, available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3wElh8N

Here’s the description of Daisy Darker.

“Alice Feeney is great with TWISTS and TURNS.” —Harlan Coben

The NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR of Rock Paper Scissors returns with a locked-room mystery when a family reunion leads to murder in a delightfully twisty and atmospheric thriller, as seen on the TODAY show.

“A dysfunctional family meets Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with a truly gasp-inducing twist. This is the book you’ve been looking for.” —Catherine Ryan Howard, bestselling author of 56 Days

Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Now after years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. When the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.

But at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows…

Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide goes out and all is revealed. As seen on the TODAY show and picked by Book of the Month, Daisy Darker’s family secrets and Alice Feeney’s trademark shocking twists will keep readers riveted.

---

ALICE FEENEY is the New York Times bestselling author of Sometimes I Lie, I Know Who You Are, His & Hers, and Rock Paper Scissors. Her novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages and have been optioned for major screen adaptations. Alice was a BBC journalist for fifteen years and now lives in the Devon countryside with her family. Daisy Darker is her fifth novel.

---

It took five years, but Alice Feeney is pleased to share her latest novel, Daisy Darker.

You do know about The Poisoned Pen’s picks for Books of the Month, don’t you? Although you can order the books through the Web Store, sometimes the store runs out of copies or out of signed copies. If you’re a member of one of the book clubs, you’re guaranteed to receive the copy from your monthly book club. Call the bookstore at (480) 947-2974 or Toll Free: (888) 560-9919 to ask about joining a club. In the meantime, as I said, you can order the books individually through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Here are the September Books of the Month at the Pen.

British Crime Club One unsigned hardcover or paperback per month

Feeney, Alice. Daisy Darker

Cozy Crimes Club One unsigned hardcover or paperback per month

Rue, Gretchen. Steeped to Death

First Mystery Club One Signed First Printing per month

Flowers, Ashley. All Good People Here

The Crime Collectors Book of the Month Club One Signed First Printing per month

Raybourn, Deanna. Killers of a Certain Age

History/Mystery Club One Signed First Printing per month 

King, Laurie R. Back to the Garden

Notable New Fiction One Signed First Printing per month

Riddle, AG. Lost in Time

International Crime One Unsigned Hardcover or paperback per month

Dicker, Joel. The Enigma of Room 622

Romance & Relationships One Unsigned Hardcover or 2 paperbacks per month

Alexander, Poppy. The Littlest Library and Lim, Roselle. Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club

Alice Feeney’s Daisy Darker is the Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen. And, you can catch Feeney tonight (Tuesday, August 30) at 7 PM (10 PM EDT) live at the store, or via the store’s Facebook page or YouTube channel. Signed copies of Daisy Darker are available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3wElh8N

Here’s the summary of Daisy Darker.

“Alice Feeney is great with TWISTS and TURNS.” —Harlan Coben

The NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR of Rock Paper Scissors returns with a locked-room mystery when a family reunion leads to murder in a delightfully twisty and atmospheric thriller, as seen on the TODAY show.

“A dysfunctional family meets Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with a truly gasp-inducing twist. This is the book you’ve been looking for.” —Catherine Ryan Howard, bestselling author of 56 Days

Daisy Darker was born with a broken heart. Now after years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in her crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. When the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.

But at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows…

Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darkers must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide goes out and all is revealed. As seen on the TODAY show and picked by Book of the Month, Daisy Darker’s family secrets and Alice Feeney’s trademark shocking twists will keep readers riveted.

---

ALICE FEENEY is the New York Times bestselling author of Sometimes I Lie, I Know Who You Are, His & Hers, and Rock Paper Scissors. Her novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages and have been optioned for major screen adaptations. Alice was a BBC journalist for fifteen years and now lives in the Devon countryside with her family. Daisy Darker is her fifth novel.

Mark your calendars for Thursday, September 1 at 6:00 PM (9 PM EDT) when Diana Gabaldon will host AG Riddle, author of Lost in Time, for a virtual event for The Poisoned Pen. Gabaldon says of the book, “Amazing! One of the twistiest time-tales I’ve ever read.” Lost in Time is The Poisoned Pen’s September Notable New Fiction Book of the Month. There are signed copies available in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3pTWzNO

Here are the copies of Lost in Time as Riddle signed them for the Pen’s customers.

Here’s the summary of Lost in Time.

From the worldwide bestselling author of Departure and Winter World comes a standalone novel about a father and daughter trying to unravel an intricate murder mystery spread across time—with a jaw-dropping twist.

Control the past.

Save the future.

One morning, Dr. Sam Anderson wakes up to find that the woman he loves has been murdered.

For Sam, the horror is only beginning.

He and his daughter are accused of the crime. The evidence is ironclad. They will be convicted.

And so, to ensure his daughter goes free, Sam does what he must: he confesses.

But in the future, murderers aren’t sent to prison.

Thanks to a machine Sam helped invent, the world’s worst criminals are now sent to the past—approximately 200 million years into the past, to the dawn of the time of the dinosaurs—where they must live out their lives alone, in exile from the human race.

Sam accepts his fate.

But his daughter doesn’t.

Adeline Anderson has already lost her mother to a deadly, unfair disease. She can’t bear to lose her father as well.

So she sets out on a quest to prove him innocent. And to get him back. People around her insist that both are impossible tasks.

But Adeline doesn’t give up. She only works harder.

She soon learns that impossible tasks are her specialty. And that she is made of tougher stuff than she ever imagined.

As she peels back the layers of the mystery that tore her father from this world, Adeline finds more questions than answers. Everyone around her is hiding a secret. But which ones are connected to the murder that exiled her father?

That mystery stretches across the past, present, and future ““ and leads to a revelation that will change everything.

---

A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting and running internet companies before retiring to focus on his true passion: writing fiction. He lives in North Carolina. Visit www.agriddle.com

Is The Hunt actually Faye Kellerman’s final Decker and Lazarus novel? She told Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, that it’s either the final book, or it will be a hiatus until the next one. You can order a signed copy of The Hunt through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3QPnDcO

Here’s the description of The Hunt.

Detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus return to Los Angeles when a kidnapping hits close to home—in this breathtaking new thriller from New York Times bestselling author Faye Kellerman.

Peter and his partner, Detective Tyler McAdams, are thrown into an unsolved case and propelled into action when a body is found in the very woods where a man previously went missing in upstate New York.

But that’s not the only crisis that Peter has to deal with.

Teresa McLaughlin, the biological mother of Peter and his wife Rina’s foster son, Gabe, has fled to Los Angeles with her two children in tow, hoping to avoid a court injunction amid a messy divorce. But LA is no escape from her problems—she is found by ruthless men and beaten mercilessly. When she wakes, barely conscious, Teresa discovers that both of her children are gone and frantically calls Gabe for help.

With his mother on the verge of death, Gabe contacts Peter and Rina, as well as his biological father, the notorious Christopher Donatti, a former hit man from a known criminal family who’s now a millionaire in Nevada. By bringing Donatti into the fray, Gabe, Peter, and Rina know they have made a deal with the devil—but they may not be able to recover the kids without him.

As these unlikely allies rally to find the kidnappers before things end tragically, they race headlong toward an explosive confrontation from which no one will emerge unscathed..

---

Faye Kellerman lives with her husband, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, in Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

---

There are a few technical difficulties in the conversation, but you should still enjoy the event.