all your Reads in Here

A new Monkeewrench novel by P.J. Tracy is always a treat. While the mother half, P.J., of P.J. Tracy died in 2016, Traci successfully keeps the series interesting. Some will want more of the Monkeewrench team in the current novel,  The Guilty Dead . As a fan of the police procedural aspect, I was perfectly satisfied with the latest book. A year after a junkie is murdered in Hollywood, that death kicks off a crime spree in Minneapolis. Homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth catch the case when the junkie's father dies. Gregory Norwood's death appears, at first glance, to be a suicide, but because the Minnesota businessman and philanthropist died of a single gunshot to the head a year after the death of  his son Trey, Magozzi is suspicious, and pushes the crime scene investigators to look further. While he and Gino focus on Norwood, Magozzi's partner, Grace MacBride, and her Monkeewrench team of computer geniuses are working on a prototype for a new software program...

Last month, I interviewed Paula Matter, author of the debut mystery, Last Call,   http://bit.ly/2OEesvq . Just this week, I had the chance to read the book, and there's so much I like about this book. I could have used a list of characters, but bartender Maggie Lewis and her story were fresh and original. Maggie Lewis has been the bartender at the VFW in North DeSoto, Florida for five years. She's a short, middle-aged, grumpy widow, but, most of the time, she enjoys the hours she spends with the regulars at the bar. Jack Hoffman has always been a pain, though. He complains about women in the bar, Maggie as a bartender, and every other issue that comes up. After writing his complaints in his notebook, he takes those problems to the board. Despite Jack's behavior, Maggie certainly wouldn't want the man dead. Why is she the main suspect when Jack's found murdered in his truck? Maggie had her first Saturday night off in five years when a younger woman is hired for the b...

In 2009, the fifth Haunted Bookshop mystery, The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion , came out. It was written under the name Alice Kimberly, a pseudonym also used by the authors who write as Cleo Coyle. On September 25, nine years later, the latest one in the series,  The Ghost and the Bogus Bestselle r by Cleo Coyle, will be released. Welcome back to Penelope Thornton-McClure and Jack Shepard. After her husband's death, Pen and her son moved to Quindicott, Rhode Island, where she took over her aunt Sadie's bookshop. She also found a ghost in the bookshop, the ghost of a private detective who had been killed there in 1949. As an avid fan of crime fiction, Pen is fascinated by the stories Jack tells, accounts of his cases in the 1940s. Some of those cases resemble current cases that Pen encounters. The hottest selling book in Buy the Book is Jessica Swindell's Shades of Leather . When a woman runs out of the store, after claiming it was her picture on the back of the book, takin...

I think I'm getting a little tired of the escapades of Stephanie Plum-like characters. Although Kellye Garrett's second Detective By Day mystery, Hollywood Ending , is set in Hollywood, apprentice private eye Dayna Anderson and her best friend, Sienna, are a little too Stephanie and Lulu for me. After solving a hit-and-run case, former commercial spokesperson Dayna Anderson wants to become an apprentice in training to cop turned private investigator Aubrey Adams-Parker. She thinks she’s found the perfect case when Lyla Davis, spokesperson for the upcoming Silver Sphere Awards event, is killed at an ATM. Dayna’s boyfriend, hot actor Omari Grant, had been at that ATM just minutes earlier. Dayna teams up with her best friend, Sienna Hayes, a reality star wannabe, and uses her wiles and connections to probe the social media secrets of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Some people have secrets worth killing for, and Lyla Davis seems to have known them all. Dayna’s soon caught up in Hollywo...