Rhys Bowen hadn’t written a Molly Murphy mystery in five years. She’s been concentrating on Her Royal Spyness and standalones. But, Rhys’ daughter, Clare Broyles, had an idea for a new Molly Murphy book. The result is Wild Irish Rose. The two authors recently appeared for a live event at The Poisoned Pen to talk about their book. There are signed copies of Wild Irish Rose available through the Web Store. https://tinyurl.com/4p4h8mpw

Here’s the description of Wild Irish Rose.

New York Times bestselling author Rhys Bowen, now writing in partnership with her daughter, Clare Broyles, transports and enthralls readers through the incomparable Molly Murphy Sullivan. Wild Irish Rose is the next novel in this beloved mystery series, a cause for celebration for readers and critics alike.

New York, 1907: Now that she’s no longer a private detective—at least not officially—Molly Murphy Sullivan is looking forward to a time of settled tranquility with friends and family. Back in New York, where her own story began, Molly decides to accompany some friends to Ellis Island to help distribute clothing to those in need. This journey quickly stirs up memories for Molly. When you’re far from home and see people from your country, every face looks like a family member.

That evening Molly’s policeman husband, Daniel, is late returning home. He comes with a tale to tell: there was a murder on Ellis Island that day, and the main suspect is the spitting image of Molly. The circumstances are eerily similar to when Molly herself arrived on Ellis Island, and she can’t help but feel a sense of fate. Molly was meant to be there that day so that she can clear this woman’s name.

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RHYS BOWEN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Anthony Award- and Agatha Award-winning Molly Murphy mysteries, the Edgar Award-nominated Evan Evans series, the Royal Spyness series, and several stand-alone novels including In Farleigh Field. Born in England, she lives in San Rafael, CA.

CLARE BROYLES, who is Rhys Bowen’s daughter, is a teacher and a musician. She has worked as a composer and arranger in the theater for both Arizona Theater Company and Childsplay and was nominated for an Arizone ‘Zoni’ theater award. Clare is married to a teacher and they have three children.

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Join Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles as they talk about their book. (The first minute or so of the sound is bad, but hang in there. The event itself sounds fine.)

Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently hosted two Poisoned Pen Press authors. Sara E. Johnson is the author of The Bone Track. Frederick Weisel’s The Day He Left reminds Peters of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books or Dell Shannon’s Luis Mendoza police procedurals. You can order copies of the books through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Here’s the description of The Bone Track.

A nature trek turns dangerous when the wilderness gives up its bones…

New Zealand’s remote Milford Track seems the perfect place for forensic investigator Alexa Glock to reconnect with her brother Charlie, with whom she hasn’t spent much time since they were kids. Their backpacking trip seems ill-fated from the start, though, when she must stop on the way to examine nine skeletons—most likely M?ori tribespeople—whose graves have been unearthed by highway construction. Before she opens the first casket, a M?ori elder gives her a dire warning: “The viewing of bones can unleash misfortune to the living. Or worse.”

Though Alexa dismisses his words as superstitious, they soon come back to haunt her as the idyllic hike takes a sinister turn. First, Charlie is aloof and resentful of the time Alexa has spent at work. Then a rock avalanche nearly carries her away as it reveals the skeletal remains of someone who has clearly been stabbed to death. When a fellow hiker goes missing and is later found dead, Alexa has all she can do to focus on the science as she investigates two murders, while trying not to become the third victim.

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Sara E. Johnson lives in Durham, North Carolina. She worked as a middle school reading specialist and local newspaper contributor before her husband lured her to New Zealand for a year. Her first novel, Molten Mud Murder, is the result.

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Here is the summary of The Day He Left.

After he was gone, the only things left behind were secrets

Annie has fallen out of the habit of listening to her husband. She and Paul have been married for a long time; it’s easy to nod as he drones on, responding to his voice while completely ignoring every word he says. That becomes a problem, of course, when Paul disappears and the police have questions. Was Paul having issues at work? Is there any reason to think he might harm himself? Annie doesn’t know.

But someone does.

An unsettling photo found amongst Paul’s things turns the investigation toward his job as a middle school teacher and a troubled girl who is hiding secrets of her own. But what exactly happened to Paul on the day he left for work and never made it to the classroom? Is his disappearance related to a local heroin trafficking operation? As Eddie Mahler and the members of the Santa Rosa Violent Crime Investigations Team rush to find the teacher, they discover the members of his family have hidden lives of their own, and that Paul may not have been running away but toward something that could ruin his career and marriage—and even cost his life.

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FREDERICK WEISEL has been a writer and editor for more than thirty years, and his articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor. He lives with his wife in Santa Rosa, California.

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Enjoy Barbara Peters’ conversation with authors Sara E. Johnson and Frederick Weisel.

I know this only contains the next five events, but check out these high-demand authors! You can order books through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/ And, you can check out the rest of the scheduled March events on the calendar. https://calendar.time.ly/9plshfqx/posterboard

You won’t want to miss some of these events, though.

Ann Parker and Donis Casey are both Poisoned Pen Press authors. Donis Casey recently hosted Ann Parker for a discussion of Parker’s eighth Silver Rush mystery, The Secret in the Wall. Parker and Casey discuss the different direction taken in the series, and Barbara Parker, the editor for the books, chimes in. You can order a copy of the book, and the books in the series through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3hBT1eW

Here’s the description of The Secret in the Wall.

Sometimes you can’t keep your gown out of the gutter…

Inez Stannert has reinvented herself—again. Fleeing the comfort and wealth of her East Coast upbringing, she became a saloon owner and card sharp in the rough silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, always favoring the unconventional path—a difficult road for a woman in the late 1800s.

Then the teenaged daughter of a local prostitute is orphaned by her mother’s murder, and Inez steps up to raise the troubled girl as her own. Inez works hard to keep a respectable, loving home for Antonia, carefully crafting their new life in San Francisco. But risk is a seductive friend, difficult to resist. When a skeleton tumbles from the wall of her latest business investment, the police only seem interested in the bag of Civil War-era gold coins that fell out with it. With her trusty derringer tucked in the folds of her gown, Inez uses her street smarts and sheer will to unearth a secret that someone has already killed to keep buried. The more she digs, the muddier and more dangerous things become.

She enlists the help of Walter de Brujin, a local private investigator with whom she shares some history. Though she wants to trust him, she fears that his knowledge of her past, along with her growing attraction to him, may well blow her veneer of respectability to bits—that is, if her dogged pursuit of the truth doesn’t kill her first.

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Ann Parker is the author of the award-winning Silver Rush historical mystery series set in 1880s, featuring saloon owner Inez Stannert. A science writer by day, Ann lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Women Writing the West.

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Poisoned Pen authors and their editor. Check out the virtual event.

Murder at the Porte de Versailles is the twentieth Aimee Leduc Investigation novel by Cara Black. Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently hosted Black for the discussion of this book. There will be signed copies available, so you can order them through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3KsWR6H

Here’s the description of Murder at the Porte de Versailles.

This riveting 20th installment entangles Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc in a dangerous web of international spycraft and terrorist threats in Paris’s 15th arrondissement.

November 2001: in the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of fear. For Aimée Leduc, November is bittersweet: the anniversary of her father’s death and her daughter’s third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory—and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimée’s friend Michou, is found unconscious at the scene of the crime with traces of explosives under his fingernails.

Aimée doesn’t believe Boris set the bomb. In an effort to prove this, she battles the police and his own lab colleagues, collecting conflicting eyewitness reports. When a member of the French secret service drafts Aimée to help investigate possible links to an Iranian Revolutionary guard and fugitive radicals who bombed Interpol in the 1980s, Aimée uncovers ties to a cold case of her father’s.

As Aimée scours the streets of the 15th arrondissement trying to learn the truth, she has to ask herself if she should succumb to pressure from Chloe’s biological father and move them out to his farm in Brittany. But could Aimée Leduc ever leave Paris?

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Cara Black is the author of twenty books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series as well as the thriller Three Hours in Paris. She has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, and her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and son and visits Paris frequently.

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Let Cara Black take you back to 2001 in Paris. Enjoy the virtual event.

Michael Connelly’s “Avalon” is a short story in Mystery Writers of America’s collection, When a Stranger Comes to Town. You can order a copy of it through the Web Store, and you might want to do that. https://bit.ly/348E3tS Peter White in Deadline recently announced an adaptation of “Avalon”.

David E. Kelley Lands Straight-To-Series Order For Adaptation Of Michael Connelly’s “˜Avalon’ At ABC

“David E. Kelley continues to add to his order book.

“The Big Little Lies creator has scored a straight-to-series order at ABC for Avalon, a drama series based on Michael Connelly‘s short story.

“It is Kelley’s latest project for the Disney-owned network ““ Big Sky is currently in its second season ““ as well as his latest adaptation of Connelly’s work. He has an adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer at Netflix.

“Avalon, which is ABC’s first straight-to-series order for its 2022-23 programming slate, takes place in the city of Avalon on Catalina Island, where L.A. Sheriff’s Department Detective Nicole “Nic” Searcy heads up a small office.

“Catalina has a local population that serves more than 1 million tourists a year, and each day when the ferries arrive, hundreds of potential new stories enter the island. Detective Searcy is pulled into a career-defining mystery that will challenge everything she knows about herself and the island.

“Avalon was published last year as part of the short story collection When a Stranger Comes to Town.

“Kelley, who will write the pilot episode, created the series with Connelly, and the pair will exec produce.”

For some reason, it seems so appropriate that Robert Dugoni’s The Silent Sisters is set in Moscow. Charles Jenkins’ third adventure finds him on a Russian kill list. You can find signed copies of the hardcover, or unsigned paperbacks in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3M64fGJ

Here’s the description of The Silent Sisters.

An Amazon Charts, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal bestselling series.

In this pulse-racing thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Agent, an American sleeper cell in Russia goes silent—and it’s one man’s duty to find them.

After a harrowing escape from Russian agents on his last mission, Charles Jenkins thinks he’s finally done with the spy game. But then the final two of the seven sisters—American assets who have been deep undercover in Russia for decades—cut off all communication with their handlers. Are they in hiding after detecting surveillance? Or have they turned and become double agents? It’s Jenkins’s duty to find out, but he’s been added to a Russian kill list. It will require all of Jenkins’s knowledge of spycraft—and an array of disguises—to return to the country undetected.

But plans go awry his first night in Moscow when Jenkins gets involved in an altercation that ends in the death of the son of one of Russia’s most powerful organized crime leaders. Pursued by mafia henchmen, Russian agents, and a particularly dogged Moscow police detective, Jenkins is determined to track down the final two sisters and get them to America—or die trying. As various forces close in, Jenkins fears this time he might’ve pushed his luck too far.

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Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite series, which has sold more than seven million books worldwide. He is also the author of the bestselling Charles Jenkins series; the bestselling David Sloane series; the stand-alone novels The 7th Canon, Damage Control, The World Played Chess, and The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, Suspense Magazine‘s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Dugoni won an AudioFile Earphones Award for narration; and the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post best book of the year. He is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for fiction and a three-time winner of the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for best novel set in the Pacific Northwest. He is a two-time finalist for the Thriller Awards and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, as well as a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award for mystery and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards. His books are sold in more than twenty-five countries and have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Visit his website at www.robertdugonibooks.com.

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Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, talks with Robert Dugoni about his trilogy. Dugoni introduces those who haven’t read the books to the background of this series.

Nothing to Lose is the new J.P. Beaumont mystery by J.A. Jance. Barbara Peters has been hosting Jance’s events for years, so it was time for another virtual event. There will be signed copies of Nothing to Lose available in the Web Store. https://tinyurl.com/mr3x8dnx Reserve them now!

Here’s the description of Nothing to Lose.

The newest thrilling Beaumont suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance, in which Beaumont is approached by a visitor from the past and finds himself drawn into a missing person’s case where danger is lurking and family secrets are exposed.      

Years ago, when he was a homicide detective with the Seattle PD, J. P. Beaumont’s partner, Sue Danielson, was murdered. Volatile and angry, Danielson’s ex-husband came after her in her home and, with nowhere else to turn, Jared, Sue’s teenage son, frantically called Beau for help. As Beau rushed to the scene, he urged Jared to grab his younger brother and flee the house. In the end, Beaumont’s plea and Jared’s quick action saved the two boys from their father’s murderous rage.

Now, almost twenty years later, Jared reappears in Beau’s life seeking his help once again—his younger brother Chris is missing. Still haunted by the events of that tragic night, Beau doesn’t hesitate to take on the case. Following a lead all the way to the wilds of wintertime Alaska, he encounters a tangled web of family secrets in which a killer with nothing to lose is waiting to take another life.

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J.A. Jance is the New York Times Bestselling author of more than sixty books. Born in South Dakota and raised in Bisbee, Arizona, she and her husband live in the Seattle area with their two longhaired dachshunds, Mary and Jojo.

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Enjoy the conversation between J.A. Jance and Barbara Peters.

Congratulations to all of the nominees for the 2022 ITW Thriller Awards! If you’d like to read them before the award ceremony in June, check out the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Here are the nominees.

2022 ITW Thriller Awards Nominees

 
BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL
 
Megan Abbott ““ THE TURNOUT (Penguin/Putnam)
S. A. Cosby ““ RAZORBLADE TEARS (Flatiron Books)
Alice Feeney ““ ROCK PAPER SCISSORS (Flatiron Books)
Rachel Howzell Hall ““ THESE TOXIC THINGS (Thomas & Mercer)
Alma Katsu ““ RED WIDOW (Penguin/Putnam)
Eric Rickstad ““ I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM (Blackstone Publishing)

BEST AUDIOBOOK
 
S. A. Cosby ““ RAZORBLADE TEARS (Macmillan)
     Narrated by Adam Lazarre-White
Samantha Downing ““ SLEEPING DOG LIE (Audible Originals)
     Narrated by Melanie Nicholls-King and Lindsey Dorcus
Rachel Howzell Hall ““ HOW IT ENDS (Audible Originals)
     Narrated by Joniece Abbott-Pratt
Gregg Hurwitz ““ PRODIGAL SON (Macmillan)
     Narrated by Scott Brick
Nadine Matheson ““ THE JIGSAW MAN (HarperCollins)
     Narrated by Davine Henry

BEST FIRST NOVEL
 
Abigail Dean ““ GIRL A (HarperCollins)
Eloísa Díaz ““ REPENTANCE (Agora Books)
Amanda Jayatissa ““ MY SWEET GIRL (Berkley)
David McCloskey ““ DAMASCUS STATION (W.W. Norton & Company)
Eric Redman ““ BONES OF HILO (Crooked Lane Books)
 
BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL NOVEL
 
Joy Castro ““ FLIGHT RISK (Lake Union)
Aaron Philip Clark ““ UNDER COLOR OF LAW (Thomas & Mercer)
C. J. Cooke ““ THE LIGHTHOUSE WITCHES (Berkley)
Jess Lourey ““ BLOODLINE (Thomas & Mercer)
Terry Roberts ““ MY MISTRESS’ EYES ARE RAVEN BLACK (Turner Publishing Company)
 
BEST SHORT STORY
 
S.A. Cosby ““ “Not My Cross to Bear” (Down & Out Books)
William Burton McCormick ““ “Demon in the Depths” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
Scott Loring Sanders ““ “The Lemonade Stand” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
Jeff Soloway ““ “The Interpreter and the Killer” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)
John Wimer ““ “Bad Chemistry” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL
 
Maureen Johnson ““ THE BOX IN THE WOODS (HarperCollins)
Nova McBee ““ CALCULATED (Wolfpack Publishing LLC)
Ginny Myers Sain ““ DARK AND SHALLOW LIES (Penguin Young Readers)
Courtney Summers ““ THE PROJECT (Wednesday Books)
Krystal Sutherland ““ HOUSE OF HOLLOW (Penguin Young Readers)
 
BEST E-BOOK ORIGINAL NOVEL
 
Greig Beck ““ THE DARK SIDE: ALEX HUNTER 9 (Pan Macmillan)
John Connell ““ WHERE THE WICKED TREAD (John Connell)
Wendy Dranfield ““ LITTLE GIRL TAKEN (Bookouture)
E.J. Findorff ““ BLOOD PARISH (E.J. Findorff)
S. E. Green ““ MOTHER MAY I (S. E. Green)
Andrew Kaplan ““ BLUE MADAGASCAR (Andrew Kaplan)
Karin Nordin ““ LAST ONE ALIVE (HarperCollins)

ITW will announce the winners at ThrillerFest XVII on Saturday, June 4, 2022 at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, New York City.