In this Pennyfoot Hotel Christmas mystery, the head count is down—but the body count is up this holiday season... With one of her housemaids leaving to get married, Cecily Sinclair Baxter wants nothing more for Christmas than some good help. Instead of visions of sugar plums, she’s calling the plumber to deal with flooded bathrooms. Then there’s the surly new janitor, who acts like he got coal in his stocking. But as Cecily scrambles to hire and train new staff in time for the holidays, one of her guests is beyond help. Gerald Evans is found stabbed to death on the beach, and Cecily soon discovers he was a private investigator from London looking into dark doings involving the Pennyfoot. Who among the staff or guests was being pursued, and what secret drove that person to cold-blooded murder?

Within the formulas of crime fiction, this collection ranges from writers Daphne du Maurier and Margery Allingham, whose names are synonymous with conventional subgenres of crime fiction, through Patricia Highsmith, and Shirley Jackson, who deliberately set conventions aside or who moved those conventions into other realms. Most important, perhaps, Jackson, Highsmith and E. X. Ferrars depict civilizations that are not essentially orderly, that are not founded upon a commonly understood concept of justice--where one must make her own order.

It is an Edwardian Christmas, and the Pennyfoot Hotel is all dressed up. But when one of the guests turns up dead, owner Cecily Sinclair Baxter realizes it is not only the Pennyfoot that is back in business—the hotel's Christmas curse is, too... The Pennyfoot halls are decked with boughs of holly, a magnificently decorated tree graces the lobby, and the hotel's bookings are finally looking up. Owner of the Pennyfoot, Cecily Sinclair Baxter is in high holiday spirits until disaster strikes, threatening to ruin yet another Yuletide. Her chief housemaid Gertie McBride has found a man's body in the hotel laundry room—with a woman's scarf wrapped around his neck and a note in his pocket from the hotel's new maid. Cecily is determined to track down the culprit, but with multiple suspects icing her out of crucial clues, she realizes this killer may be more slippery than most. With Christmas right around the corner, it is up to Cecily to prevent this holiday season at the Pennyfoot from turning out more fatal than festive.

Not even her impending nuptials can keep Lucy Berberian, manager of her family-owned Kebab Kitchen, from the Jersey Shore’s annual Polar Bear Plunge. But her dive into the icy ocean is especially chilling when she finds a fellow swimmer doing the dead man’s float—for real . . . Who would kill a man in cold blood during Ocean Crest, New Jersey’s most popular winter event? When Lucy learns the victim is Deacon Spooner, the reception hall owner who turned up his nose—and his price—at her wedding plans, she can’t help wondering who wouldn’t kill the pompous caterer . . . Perhaps the culprit is the wedding cake baker whose career Deacon nearly destroyed? Or the angry bride whose reception he ruined? With her maid of honor, Katie, busily planning Lucy’s wedding without her, Lucy will have to get to the bottom of this cold-hearted business in time for Kebab Kitchen’s mouthwatering Christmas celebration—and before her hometown’s holiday spirit washes out to sea . . . Recipes included! “With a warm cast of characters and an ingenious main character, this is a series that will prove delightful for cozy fans.” —Parkersburg News & Sentinel on Stabbed in the Baklava “Clever and charming . . . A culinary delight that will have readers salivating over the food and hungry for literary answers.” —RT Book Reviews, 4 Stars, on Hummus and Homicide

Melanie West is getting her life back on track after a messy divorce when her grandmother, Liza Harris, asks her to open a B&B with her. Together, Liza and Melanie purchase a purportedly haunted mansion on the Oregon coast and jump right into clearing out the cobwebs. But while attempting to remove wallpaper in an upstairs bedroom, the new B&B owners stumble upon a very real skeleton in their closet. The police suspect the skeleton is that of the wife of the previous owner of the B&B, but no one in town seems to want to say much about her. As the inn owners try to juggle renovations with their own amateur investigations, their grand opening looms closer and closer--and a friendly ghost in their walls starts playing tricks. But it all comes crashing to a halt when a new body is found stabbed to death on the beach below the inn--the victim chillingly close in resemblance to Melanie herself. It seems someone doesn't appreciate newcomers prying into the small town's past, and now it's up to Melanie and Liza to get to the bottom of these murders to save their business...and their lives.

In bestselling author Kate Kingsbury's Misty Bay Tea Room series debut, the proprietress of a British-style tea shop must draw on her love for mystery novels to sleuth a murder. Vivian Wainwright is living her dream. The middle-aged widow owns the Misty Bay Tearoom, a quaint, English-accented shop on the Oregon coast. But on the eve of the tearoom's second anniversary, the dream turns nightmarish when a man falls to his death from a hotel balcony. The body belongs to Dean Ramsey, ex-husband of Vivian's assistant, Jenna. Detective Tony Messina quickly zeroes in on Jenna as prime suspect, since she was seen leaving the hotel shortly before the body was found. Vivian and her other assistant, Gracie, set out to help clear Jenna's name, using their wit and a bit of criminology know-how Vivian picked up from her late attorney husband. Detective Messina is on board, but he's starting to develop feelings for his number one suspect. Puzzling questions persist--chief among them, whose clothes was Dean wearing when he landed on the rocky shore? To complicate matters, Vivian's friend, pet shop owner Hal Douglass, seems to know some secrets about the hotel that could add a long list of names to the suspect list...including Hal's own. Vivian must work quickly because if she can't, Jenna faces a murder rap...or worse.

The peace and tranquility of the Misty Bay Tearoom is rocked by murder and a long-buried secret hidden in a most unlikely place in bestselling author Kate Kingsbury’s second charming book for fans of Cleo Coyle and Laura Childs. It seemed like a simple case: the murder of Lewis Trenton, a beachcomber who lived alone in a cabin in the Oregon hills. But the newspaper article piques the interest of Vivian Wainwright, owner of the British-style Misty Bay Tearoom. The photo accompanying the article shows Lewis’s cluttered living room, and on the shelf is a replica of Big Ben. Vivian is sure she sold the clock a week before in her shop. Who could have given the replica to Lewis? Unable to keep from doing a bit of sleuthing, Vivian hunts down the replica in a local thrift shop, noticing that the base is missing, rendering it worthless, but just as Vivian is about to throw it in the trash, a sparkle catches her eye. It’s a diamond, hidden away in a crevice in the clock. Vivian takes the diamond to Detective Tony Messina, who identifies it as part of a jewelry heist in Portland a month earlier. Portland police think Lewis was the fence who sold the jewels, and that he was killed after double-crossing the thieves—but Messina doesn’t believe the story. What was the true motive behind Lewis’s murder? How did he come upon the diamond? And what secrets can the clock tell—before the killer strikes again?

Our picture of a chimney sweep is often Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. This meticulously researched examination shows a different side to this hazardous trade. The art and science of chimney sweeping are examined in detail for the first time in this lively and fascinating book. From the development of chimneys in the twelfth century, replacing the open cooking fire in a smoke-filled room with a plain hole in the roof, to the patenting of mechanical devices in the late nineteenth century that came to the rescue of many a poor climbing boy, all is revealed. The personalities who dominated the profession, which surprisingly included several women sweeps, are portrayed, along with many illustrations of the tools of the trade. Sweeping techniques, the impact of social reform and the place of the sweep in literature are explored in this absorbing work. With 75 black-and-white illustrations.

When a guest mysteriously dies at the Merry Ghost Inn, Melanie and her grandmother fear that their professional reputations—and their lives—are on the line With the arrival of six senior reading group members at the Merry Ghost Inn, the long-awaited Grand Opening week has finally begun for Melanie West and her grandmother, Liza. All is well with the Oregon coast-side B&B until Melanie’s dog, Max, finds the dead body of one of their guests. Everyone at the inn immediately falls under suspicion, including the innkeepers themselves. Melanie and Liza are not sure who they can trust, and the idea of cohabitating with a murderer is enough to send chills down anyone’s spine. To make matters worse, the curmudgeonly town detective wants them to steer clear of the investigation, but doesn’t seem too inspired to solve the case in a timely fashion himself. To clear their own names and to avoid the blight on the inn’s reputation that yet another dead body will bring, Melanie and Liza dive headlong into the murder investigation. With a little help from their chuckling ghost, Melanie and Liza dodge the detective, tip-toe around their suspicious guests, and still serve up delicious Bed & Breakfast meals on time in Kate Kingsbury’s delightful second Merry Ghost Inn mystery, Doom with a View.

In this remarkable book, Martha Hailey DuBose has given those multitudes of readers who love the mystery novel an indispensable addition to their libraries. Unlike other works on the subject, Women of Mystery is not merely a directory of the novelists and their publications with a few biographical details. DuBose combines extensive research into the lives of significant women mystery writers from Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart with critical essays on their work, anecdotes, contemporary reviews and opinions and some of the women's own comments. She takes us through the Golden Age of the British women mystery writers, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and Tey, to the leading crime novelists of today, focused on the women who have become legends of the genre. And though she laments, "so many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort a mentioning "some of the best of the rest." When DuBose writes of the lives of her principal players, she relates them to their times, their families, their personal situations and above all to their books. She subtly points out that Sayers, whose experience with the men in her life was inevitably disastrous, created in Lord Peter the ideal lover -- one who is all that a woman desires and needs. DuBose gives us the curriculum vitae that Dorothy Sayers created to help her bring Peter Wimsey to a virtual actuality. Ngaio Marsh would give up an active presence in the theatrical world she loved, but she recreated it for herself as well as her readers in many of her novels. The biographies of these woman are as engrossing as the stories they wrote, and Martha DuBose has shined a different, intimate and intriguing light on them, their works, and the lives that informed those works. This book is so full of treasure it's hard to see how any mystery enthusiast will be able to do without it. And what a gift it would make for anyone on your list who has been heard to announce "I love a mystery." Some of the treats inside: In the Beginning: The Mothers of Detection Anna Katherine Green Mary Roberts Rinehart A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Josephine Tey Modern Motives: Mysteries of the Murderous Mind Patricia Highsmith P.D. James Ruth Rendell Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton and more!!