Jess Armstrong’s debut mystery, The Curse of Penryth Hall, is the Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen. There are signed copies available in the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3GCSIx5
Here’s the description of The Curse of Penryth Hall.
An atmospheric gothic mystery that beautifully brings the ancient Cornish countryside to life, Armstrong introduces heroine Ruby Vaughn in her Minotaur Books & Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning debut, The Curse of Penryth Hall.
After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and house mate in Exeter. She’s always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A more sensible soul would have delivered the package and left without rehashing old wounds. But no one has ever accused Ruby of being sensible. Thus begins her visit to Penryth Hall.
A foreboding fortress, Penryth Hall is home to Ruby’s once dearest friend, Tamsyn, and her husband, Sir Edward Chenowyth. It’s an unsettling place, and after a more unsettling evening, Ruby is eager to depart. But her plans change when Penryth’s bells ring for the first time in thirty years. Edward is dead; he met a gruesome end in the orchard, and with his death brings whispers of a returned curse. It also brings Ruan Kivell, the person whose books brought her to Cornwall, the one the locals call a Pellar, the man they believe can break the curse. Ruby doesn’t believe in curses—or Pellars—but this is Cornwall and to these villagers the curse is anything but lore, and they believe it will soon claim its next victim: Tamsyn.
To protect her friend, Ruby must work alongside the Pellar to find out what really happened in the orchard that night.
Jess Armstrong’s debut novel The Curse of Penryth Hall won the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur First Crime Novel Competition. She has a masters degree in American History but prefers writing about imaginary people to the real thing. Jess lives in New Orleans with her historian husband, two sons, yellow cat, speckled dog, and the world’s most pampered school-fair goldfish. And when she’s not working on her next project, she’s probably thinking about cheese, baking, tweeting or some combination of the above. You can find her on Twitter at or see what’s new on her website.
The Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen is S.J. Rozan’s latest Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery, The Mayors of New York. You an order a signed copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/4ajlSi8
Here’s the description of The Mayors of New York.
The new crime novel from the award-winning S. J. Rozan, where private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves thrust into the mystery behind the disappearance of the teenage son of the mayor of New York.
In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears.
Called in by the mayor’s chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers.
Why did the boy leave? Who else is searching for him, and why? What is his twin sister hiding?
Then a teen is found dead and another is hit by gunfire. Are these tragedies related to each other, and to the mayor’s missing son?
In a desperate attempt to find the answer to the boy’s disappearance before it’s too late, Bill and Lydia turn to the only contacts they think will be able to help: the neighborhood leaders who are the real ‘mayors’ of New York.
S. J. Rozan is the author of Family Business, The Art of Violence, Paper Son, and many other crime novels. She has won multiple awards for her fiction, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity, the Japanese Maltese Falcon, and the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. S. J. was born and raised in the Bronx and now lives in lower Manhattan.
John Charles recently welcomed authors Paige Shelton, Kate Carlisle and Jenn McKinlay to The Poisoned Pen. Shelton’s latest book is Lost Hours. Carlisle’s is The Twelve Books of Christmas. McKinlay’s latest Cupcake Bakery mystery is Sugar Plum Poisoned. You can order signed copies through the Webstore.
Here’s the description of Lost Hours.
Lost Hours is the fifth instalment in Paige Shelton’s gripping, atmospheric Alaska Wild series.
A year after arriving in Benedict, Beth Rivers is feeling very at home in Alaska, even as outsiders are starting to return to enjoy the brief summer perfection. Beth feels like she’s finally let go of most of her demons. She’s even found her father, Eddy Rivers—or, rather, he found her—and she’s trying to find the middle ground between anger and forgiveness.
One sunny July day, Beth boards a tourist ship to see the glaciers, the main reason visitors venture to the area, and something Beth hasn’t attempted until now. But when the captain has to navigate to an island, a bloodied woman is found standing on the shore, waving for help. When she’s brought aboard, she claims she was kidnapped from her home in Juneau three days earlier, and that a bear on the island killed her captor. She, however, is unharmed.
The woman, Sadie, finds a sympathetic ear in Beth. She tells her that she’s been in Juneau under witness protection, and that the Juneau police don’t like her. When another kidnapping occurs, Beth and police chief Gril can’t help but think the two cases are interwoven, though the clues to solving them will be harder to unravel.
PAIGE SHELTON had a nomadic childhood, as her father’s job as a football coach took her family to seven different towns before she was even twelve years old. After college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought she’d only stay a couple years, but instead she fell in love with the mountains and a great guy who became her husband. After many decades in Utah, she and her family moved to Arizona. She writes the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series and the Alaska Wild series.Her other series include the Farmers’ Market, Cooking School, and Dangerous Type mystery series.
Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mystery is The Twelve Books of Christmas.
The first ever Christmas mystery in the beloved New York Times bestselling Bibliophile Mystery series!
San Francisco book-restoration expert Brooklyn Wainwright and her hunky security-expert husband, Derek Stone, face a locked-room murder mystery during the holidays in Scotland.
In the middle of a wonderful Christmas holiday in Dharma, Brooklyn and Derek receive a frantic phone call from their dear friend Claire in Loch Ness, Scotland. The laird of the castle, Cameron MacKinnon, has just proposed to her! They plan to be married on New Year’s Day, and they want Derek and Brooklyn to be their witnesses. And while they’re visiting, Claire hopes that Brooklyn will be able to solve a little mystery that’s occurred in the castle library—twelve very rare, very important books have gone missing.
Once in Scotland, Brooklyn starts working on the mystery of the missing books but is soon distracted by all of the thumping and bumping noises she’s been hearing in the middle of the night. You’d think the Ghost of Christmas Past had taken up residence. But when one of the guests is poisoned and another is killed by an arrow through the heart, Brooklyn and Derek know this is not the work of any ghost. Now they must race to find a killer and a book thief before another murder occurs and their friends’ bright and happy future turns dark and deadly.
Kate Carlisle is the New York Times bestselling author of the Bibliophile Mysteries, including Little Black Book and The Grim Reader, as well as the Fixer-Upper Mysteries, including Absence of Mallets.
Sugar Plum Poisoned is the first Christmas mystery in the Cupcake Bakery series.
It’s Christmastime, and this holiday season, things are heating up for the bakers at Fairy Tale Cupcakes, in the newest Cupcake Bakery Mystery from New York Times bestselling author Jenn McKinlay.
When up-and-coming singing sensation Shelby Vaughn arrives in town for two weeks of concert dates, she hires her old friend Angie and the rest of the bakery crew to supply cupcakes for the VIP guest lounge every night.
After overhearing Shelby in a heated argument with her manager, Mel is concerned, but she and the crew decide to make the best of their time working with the star. Just as the bakers fall into the rhythm of the job, Shelby’s manager is found dead, clutching a bit of fabric from a Santa suit and a cupcake. With the bakery crew and Shelby’s backup dancers all dressed in similar Santa costumes, it’s impossible to say who is the killer. When all suspicions lead back to Shelby, Mel and Angie stand up for their friend, determined to prove her innocence before she’s frosted for a crime she didn’t commit.
Jenn McKinlay is the award-winning New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of several mystery and romance series. Her work has been translated into multiple languages in countries all over the world. She lives in sunny Arizona in a house that is overrun with kids, pets, and her husband’s guitars.
Enjoy the conversation with Paige Shelton, Kate Carlisle, and Jenn McKinlay.
John Charles of The Poisoned Pen always asks authors to introduce themselves before they were published. Jennifer Graeser Dornbush has an interesting backstory about her father, the medical examiner. Her background inspires her writing, including her new book, Last One Alive. It’s the third book in her Coroner’s Daughter Mystery series. Signed copies are available in the Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/4cyvrrde
Here’s the summary of Last One Alive.
Dr. Emily Hartford is back in Chicago, ready to move forward and leave the past behind, until an unexpected request for help sends her deep into an investigation—and into the path of a killer.
Seventeen months after the Parkman case, Dr. Hartford has returned to Chicago to finish her surgical residency. But when she is contacted out of the blue by Solange McClelland, the only survivor of a decade-old triple homicide, Emily is compelled to dig deeper. She doesn’t know the details of the event but remembers it as one of the few cases her deceased father never solved.
On her thirtieth birthday, Solange opens a long-forgotten safe-deposit box and is entirely baffled by what she finds. Inside are not only painful reminders of a once-happy youth but almost four million dollars—enough to pursue and finally solve the mystery of who brutally murdered her family. It’s been over ten years, and Solange has built a new life in Detroit with her husband, Joseph. But there are certain disturbing questions about her past that she is determined to answer. So she reaches out to the only one who might know something about her family’s deaths and their possibly erroneous death certificates—Dr. Hartford, the daughter of Freeport’s former medical examiner.
Finding it impossible to believe that her scrupulous father made a mistake, Emily joins Solange’s pursuit of the truth, and as subzero temperatures blanket snow-covered Michigan, the two women pursue justice in two very different ways. But lurking nearby in the frigid cold is a crafty, unrepentant killer, determined to finish what he started long ago.
Jennifer Graeser Dornbush is a screenwriter, author, international speaker, and forensic specialist. She is developing multiple projects for TV and film while also penning mysteries, thrillers, and short stories. Join her monthly newsletter at www.JenniferDornbush.com.
Enjoy Dornbush’s backstory and the backstory of her latest book.
Murder Crossed Her Mind is the fourth book in Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker mystery series. Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently welcomed Spotswood to talk about his book. She said she thinks this is more a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin adventure rather than a Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson book. You can check this out yourself by ordering a signed copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3NhchOY
Here’s the summary of Murder Crossed Her Mind.
The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The latest action-packed installment in the Nero Award–winning Pentecost & Parker Mystery series follows Lillian and Will tracking the suspicious disappearance of a woman who might have known too much. From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.
Vera Bodine, an elderly shut-in with an exceptional memory, has gone missing and famed detective Lillian Pentecost and her crackerjack assistant Willowjean “Will” Parker have been hired to track her down. But the New York City of 1947 can be a dangerous place, and there’s no shortage of people who might like to get ahold of what’s in Bodine’s head.
Does her disappearance have to do with the high-profile law firm whose secrets she still keeps; the violent murder of a young woman, with which Bodine had lately become obsessed; or is it the work she did with the FBI hunting Nazi spies intent on wartime sabotage? Any and all are on the suspect list, including their client, Forest Whitsun, hotshot defense attorney and no friend to Pentecost and Parker.
The clock is ticking to get Bodine back alive, but circumstances conspire to pull both investigators away from the case. Will is hot on the trail of a stickup team who are using her name—and maybe her gun—for their own ends. While Lillian again finds herself up against murder-obsessed millionaire Jessup Quincannon, who has discovered a secret from her past—something he plans to use to either rein the great detective in . . . or destroy her.
To solve this mystery, and defeat their own personal demons, the pair will have to go nose-to-nose with murderous gangsters, make deals with conniving federal agents, confront Nazi spies, and bend their own ethical rules to the point of breaking. Before time runs out for everyone.
STEPHEN SPOTSWOOD is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and educator. As a journalist, he has spent much of the last two decades writing about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggles of wounded veterans. His dramatic work has been widely produced across the United States and he is the winner of the 2021 Nero Award for best American mystery. He makes his home in Washington, DC with his wife, young adult author Jessica Spotswood.
If you’re a fan of Stephen Spotswood, or Nero Wolfe, you’ll want to watch the conversation.
Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, and author Douglas Preston have worked together for over thirty years, so they have stories to tell. Preston’s latest book is The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder. There are signed copies of the book available through the Webstore. https://tinyurl.com/2p924576
Here’s the description of The Lost Tomb.
Douglas Preston, the #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, presents the jaw-dropping discovery of a vast Egyptian tomb containing dozens of sealed burial chambers, as well as recounting tales of pirate treasure, mysterious deaths, archaeological mysteries, and more…
What’s it like to be the first to enter an Egyptian burial chamber that’s been sealed for thousands of years? Where might a blocked doorway or newly excavated corridor lead? And what might this stupendous tomb reveal about the most powerful pharaoh in Egyptian history?
From the jungles of Honduras to macabre archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Douglas Preston’s journalistic explorations have taken him across the globe. He broke the story of an extraordinary mass grave of animals killed by the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, he explored what lay hidden in the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island, and he roamed the haunted hills of Italy in search of the Monster of Florence. When he hasn’t been co-authoring bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Preston has been writing about some of the world’s strangest and most dramatic mysteries.
The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.
Douglas Preston worked as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History and taught writing at Princeton University. He has written for the New Yorker, Natural History, National Geographic, Harper’s, Smithsonian, and the Atlantic. The author of several acclaimed nonfiction books—including Lost City of the Monkey God, Cities of Gold and The Monster of Florence—Preston is also the coauthor with Lincoln Child of the bestselling series of novels featuring FBI agent Pendergast.
John Charles from The Poisoned Pen recently welcomed Sheila Roberts for a virtual author chat. Roberts is the author of The Twelve Months of Christmas, “a cozy Christmas romance novel”. You can order a copy of it through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3Gsft6P
Here’s the description of The Twelve Months of Christmas.
Three women. Three terrible Christmases. Can they finally perfect the holiday by celebrating every month?
From USA TODAY bestselling author Sheila Roberts comes a story of family, second chances and holiday do-overs, brimming with warmth and Christmas charm.
Sunny, Arianna and Molly are having three very different but equally terrible Christmases. Sunny is a newlywed with two new stepkids who want nothing to do with her; Arianna is newly divorced and hates having to send her daughter off to spend the holiday with her dad; for Molly, nothing is new, but her job at the post office is getting very, very old.
The whole Christmas season has been a bust all around. But Sunny and Arianna have a wild idea: What if they had a Christmas do-over in January? February? On Saint Patrick’s Day?
Christmas all year long—what could that look like? As these three determined women chase the perfect holiday through twelve months of cooking disasters, over-the-top festivity, and lots of laughter and tears, they’ll discover perfection is way overrated.
“When it comes to crafting feel-good stories that cleverly mix love and laughter, then skillfully wrap everything up with a bright holiday bow, Roberts is in a class by herself.”—Booklist
Sheila Roberts lives in the Pacific Northwest. To date, she has seen over three million books sold both at home and abroad. Several of her books have been adapted for film by Hallmark, Lifetime, and GAF, including her holiday perennial, On Strike for Christmas, The Nine Lives of Christmas, with a sequel The Nine Kittens of Christmas, and most recently, Christmas on Candy Cane Lane.
Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently welcomed Val McDermid for a virtual event for the bookstore. Past Lying is the seventh in the series. Peters recommends the Karen Pirie series, Season 1, on BritBox, if you have the chance to watch it. You can order an unsigned edition of the U.S. edition, or a signed copy of the U.K. edition through the Webstore, although there aren’t a large number of the U.K. copies left. https://store.poisonedpen.com/browse/filter/t/Past%20Lying/k/keyword
Here’s the summary of Past Lying.
In this superb new addition to Val McDermid’s masterful crime series, DCI Karen Pirie returns in a propulsive thriller of deceit and vengeance, set against the disquiet of a global pandemic
Britain’s reigning “Queen of Crime” (The Scotsman), Val McDermid is the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of over thirty novels. The long-awaited seventh novel in the acclaimed series that has captivated audiences for twenty years, both on the page and now in the Edgar Award–nominated ITV/BritBox show, Past Lying is a full tilt novel of ego, retribution, deceit, and just how far one will go to settle the score.
It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but a mere pandemic doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. When a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. At the center of it, a novel: two crime novelists facing off over a chessboard. But it quickly emerges that their real-life competition is drawing blood. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, and as Karen and her team attempt to disentangle fact from fiction, it becomes clear that their investigation is more complicated than they ever imagined.
A tense, atmospheric page-turner, Past Lying reaffirms McDermid as one of the most talented crime writers of her generation.
Val McDermid’s bestselling novels have won the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award, and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger and Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for outstanding achievement. She is also a multiple finalist for the Edgar Award, including for the Fact Crime nominee Forensics. She lives in Scotland.
Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, welcomed M.M. DeLuca to the bookstore. They talked about Durham, England, and Winnipeg, Canada before they talked about DeLuca’s latest book, The Night Side. You can order a copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3Ruy7kQ
Here’s the description of The Night Side.
Twenty years of secrets. One deadly truth.
When Ruby Carlson was eighteen, she ran away from her home in Stoneybrook, Montana, and vowed she’d never return. Never return to life under the control of her manipulative mother, Ida, a self-styled medium and psychic scammer who made a career out of ruining people’s lives. Never return to the small town where enemies lurk at every turn.
But now, twenty years later, Ruby is back. Her mother is missing, presumed dead, and Ruby reluctantly returns to a home filled with chilling memories to settle Ida’s affairs. Did she really commit suicide by drowning, or is this another dark scheme? Ruby thought she knew everything about her mother, but finds herself unraveling a web of lies and secrets to reveal a story more twisted than anyone could have imagined . . .
M.M. DeLuca spent her childhood in Durham, England. After studying at the University of London, Goldsmiths College, she moved to Winnipeg, Canada, where she worked as a teacher, then as a freelance writer. She is the author of four other gripping suspense novels: The Savage Instinct, The Secret Sister, The Perfect Family Man and Lilah.
Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently welcomed Lauren Nossett to talk about her latest novel, The Professor. Nossett said it’s a novel about student/faculty relationships. You can order a signed copy through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/3GoygzK
Here’s the description of The Professor.
“The Professor is a thoroughly gripping mystery about power, ambition, and the lengths we will go to in order to succeed. Pacey and full of tension, this one will stick with you long after THE END.” –New York Times and #1 International Bestselling author, Karin Slaughter
For fans of Tana French, The Professor investigates the darkest corners of academic life: ambition, lies, and obsession.
On a spring afternoon in Athens, Georgia, Ethan Haddock is discovered in his apartment, dead, apparently by his own hand. His fatality immediately garners media attention: not because his death reflects the troubling increase of depression and mental health issues among college students, but because the media has caught the whiff of a scandal. His professor, Dr. Verena Sobek, has been taken in for questioning, and there are rumors his death is the result of a bad romance. A Title IX investigation is opened, the professor is suspended, and social media crusaders and trolls alike are out for blood.
Marlitt Kaplan never investigated love affairs. A former detective turned research assistant, she misses the excitement of her old job, but most of all the friendship of her partner, Teddy. When her mother, a professor at the university and colleague of the accused professor, asks for her help, she finds herself in the impossible position of proving something didn’t happen. Without the credentials to interview suspects or access phone records, she will have to get closer to a victim’s life than ever before. And she quickly finds herself in his apartment, having dinner with his roommates, even sleeping in his bed. But is she too close to see the truth?
In her relentless pursuit to uncover the mystery behind Ethan’s death, Marlitt will be forced to confront the power structures ingrained in the classroom against the backdrop of a historic campus and an institution that sometimes fails its most vulnerable members.
Lauren Nossett is a professor of German language and literature. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals and edited volumes. She attended the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop in 2015 and 2017. The Resemblance is her first novel. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
