Book Review
Sleuthing Women: 10 First-in-Series Mysteries Collection
Authors: Lois Winston, Jonnie Jacobs, Judy Alter, Maggie Toussaint, Camille Minichino, RP Dahlke, Susan Santangelo, Mary Kennedy, Heather Haven, and Vinnie Hansen
Publisher: Creative Words Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2016
Format: eBook - 3000+ pages
Kindle - 4999 KB
Nook - 3 MB
ASIN: B01E7EEJLA
BNID: 2940153179940
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Buy The Collection:
Disclaimer: I received a copy of the book from the authors in exchange for my honest review and participation in a virtual book tour event hosted by Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours.
Book Description:
ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY GLUE GUN, an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery by Lois Winston—Working mom Anastasia is clueless about her husband’s gambling addiction until he permanently cashes in his chips and her comfortable middle-class life craps out. He leaves her with staggering debt, his communist mother, and a loan shark demanding $50,000. Then she’s accused of murder…
MURDER AMONG NEIGHBORS, a Kate Austen Suburban Mystery by Jonnie Jacobs — When Kate Austen’s socialite neighbor, Pepper Livingston, is murdered, Kate becomes involved in a sea of steamy secrets that bring her face to face with shocking truths—and handsome detective Michael Stone.
SKELETON IN A DEAD SPACE, a Kelly O’Connell Mystery by Judy Alter—Real estate isn’t a dangerous profession until Kelly O’Connell stumbles over a skeleton and runs into serial killers and cold-blooded murderers in a home being renovated in Fort Worth. Kelly barges through life trying to keep from angering her policeman boyfriend Mike and protect her two young daughters.
IN FOR A PENNY, a Cleopatra Jones Mystery by Maggie Toussaint—Accountant Cleo faces an unwanted hazard when her golf ball lands on a dead banker. The cops think her BFF shot him, so Cleo sets out to prove them wrong. She ventures into the dating world, wrangles her teens, adopts the victim’s dog, and tries to rein in her mom…until the killer puts a target on Cleo’s back.
THE HYDROGEN MURDER, a Periodic Table Mystery by Camille Minichino—A retired physicist returns to her hometown of Revere, Massachusetts and moves into an apartment above her friends’ funeral home. When she signs on to help the Police Department with a science-related homicide, she doesn’t realize she may have hundreds of cases ahead of her.
RETIREMENT CAN BE MURDER—A Baby Boomer Mystery by Susan Santangelo—Carol Andrews dreads her husband Jim’s upcoming retirement more than a root canal without Novocain. She can’t imagine anything worse than having an at-home husband with time on his hands and nothing to fill it—until Jim is suspected of murdering his retirement coach.
DEAD AIR, A Talk Radio Mystery by Mary Kennedy—Psychologist Maggie Walsh moves from NY to Florida to become the host of WYME’s On the Couch with Maggie Walsh. When her guest, New Age prophet Guru Sanjay Gingii, turns up dead, her new roommate Lark becomes the prime suspect. Maggie must prove Lark innocent while dealing with a killer who needs more than just therapy.
A DEAD RED CADILLAC, A Dead Red Mystery by RP Dahlke—When her vintage Cadillac is found tail-fins up in a nearby lake, the police ask aero-ag pilot Lalla Bains why an elderly widowed piano teacher is found strapped in the driver’s seat. Lalla confronts suspects, informants, cross-dressers, drug-running crop dusters, and a crazy Chihuahua on her quest to find the killer.
MURDER IS A FAMILY BUSINESS, an Alvarez Family Murder Mystery by Heather Haven—Just because a man cheats on his wife and makes Danny DeVito look tall, dark and handsome, is that any reason to kill him? The reluctant and quirky PI, Lee Alvarez, has her work cut out for her when the man is murdered on her watch. Of all the nerve.
MURDER, HONEY, a Carol Sabala Mystery by Vinnie Hansen—When the head chef collapses into baker Carol Sabala’s cookie dough, she is thrust into her first murder investigation. Suspects abound at Archibald’s, the swanky Santa Cruz restaurant where Carol works. The head chef cut a swath of people who wanted him dead from ex-lovers to bitter rivals to greedy relatives.
Book Excerpt:
A Book Excerpt
(from Assault With a Deadly Glue Gun by Lois
Winston)
I
hate whiners. Always have. So I was doing my damnedest not to become one, in
spite of the lollapalooza of a quadruple whammy that had broadsided me last
week. Not an easy task, given that one of those lollapalooza whammies had
barged into my bedroom and was presently hammering her cane against my bathroom
door.
“Damn it, Anastasia! Hot water
doesn’t grow on trees, you know!”
Some people can’t start the day
without a cigarette. Lucille Pollack, Monster-in-Law from the Stygian Swamp,
can’t start hers without a sludge load of complaints. As much as I detest
cigarettes, I’d much prefer a nicotine-puffing mother-in-law, as long as she
came with an occasional kind word and a semi-pleasant disposition.
Unfortunately, marriage is a package deal. Husbands come with family. And mine
came with a doozie to end all doozies.
My mother-in-law is a
card-carrying, circa 1930s communist. When she met me, it was hate at first
sight. I bear the name of a dead Russian princess, thanks to my mother’s
unsubstantiated Romanov link—a great-grandmother with the maiden name of
Romanoff. With Mama, the connection is more like sixty, not six, degrees of
separation, and the links are coated with a thick layer of rust. But that’s
never stopped Mama from bragging about our royal ancestry, and it set the tone
for my relationship—or lack of it—with my mother-in-law from Day One.
I suppose I didn’t help the
situation by naming one of my sons Nicholas and the other Alexander, even if
they were named after my grandfathers—Alexander Periwinkle and Nicholas
Sudberry.
“My kingdom for a bedroom door
lock,” I muttered. Not that I had much of a kingdom left. So it would have to
be a really cheap lock.
“About time,” said Lucille as I
exited the bathroom amidst a cloud of warm steam. “Some people have no
consideration of others.” Raising one of her Sequoia-like arms, she waved her
cane in my face. “Those boys of yours have been camped out in the other
bathroom for half an hour doing what, I can’t imagine.”
Lucille always referred to Nick and
Alex as those boys, refusing to use
their given names. Like it might corrupt her political sensibilities or
something.
“Three minutes,” she continued
ranting. “That’s all it takes me to
shower and all it should take any of you. I’m the only person in this house who
gives one iota of concern for the earth’s depleting resources.”
She landed an elbow to my ribs to
push me aside. Manifesto, her runt-of-the-litter French bulldog—or Mephisto,
the Devil Dog, as the rest of the family had dubbed the Satan-incarnate
canine—followed close on her heels. As he squeezed past me, he raised his
wrinkled head and growled.
As soon as they’d both muscled
their way into the bathroom, my mother-in-law slammed the door in my face and
locked it. God only knows why she needs her dog in the bathroom with her. And
if he does know, I hope he continues to spare the rest of us the knowledge.
My Grandma Periwinkle used to say
that honeyed words conquered waspish dispositions. However, I doubted all the
beehives in North America could produce enough honey to mollify the likes of
Lucille. After eighteen years as her daughter-in-law, I still hadn’t succeeded
in extracting a single pleasantry from her.
Of all the shocks I sustained over
the past week, knowing I was now stuck with Lucille topped the list. Two months
ago, she shattered her hip in a hit-and-run accident when an SUV mowed her down
while she jaywalked across Queens Boulevard. Her apartment building burned to
the ground while she was in the hospital.
Comrade Lucille put her political
beliefs above everyone and everything, including common sense. Since she didn’t
trust banks, her life savings, along with all her possessions, had gone up in
flames. And of course, she didn’t have insurance.
Homeless and penniless, Lucille
came to live with us. “It won’t be for long,” my husband Karl (Lucille had
named him after Karl Marx) had assured me. “Only until she gets back on her
feet.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I
asked.
“Literally.” Karl liked his mother
best when two rivers and an hour’s drive separated them. “I promise, we’ll find
somewhere for her to live, even if we have to pay for it ourselves.”
Trusting person that I am—was—I believed him. We had
a moderately sized nest egg set aside, and I would have been more than happy to
tap into it to settle Lucille into a retirement community. Lucille had
recovered from her injuries, although the chances of her now leaving any time
soon were as nonexistent as the eggs in that same nest.
Unbeknownst to me—formerly known as Trusting
Wife—Karl, who handled the family finances, had not only cracked open, fried,
and devoured our nest egg, he’d maxed out our home equity line of credit,
borrowed against his life insurance policy, cashed in his 401(k), and drained
the kids’ college accounts.
I discovered this financial quagmire within
twenty-four hours of learning that my husband, who was supposed to be at a
sales meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had dropped dead on a roulette table
at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. The love of my life was a closet gambling
addict. He left me and his sons totally broke, up the yin-yang in debt, and saddled with his mother.
If he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him.
Without a doubt, a jury of my peers would rule it
justifiable homicide.
With Ralph, our African Grey
parrot, keeping a voyeuristic eye on me from his perch atop the armoire, I
dried myself off and began to dress for work.
They say the wife is always the
last to know. For the past week I’d wracked my brain for
signs I might have missed, niggling doubts I may have brushed aside. Even in
retrospect, I had no clue of impending cataclysm. Karl was that good. Or maybe
I had played my role of Trusting Wife too well. Either way, the result was the
same.
Karl and I hadn’t had the best of
marriages, but we hadn’t had the worst, either. We might not have had the
can’t-wait-to-jump-your-bones hots for each other after so many years, but how
many couples did? That sort of love only exists in chick flicks and romance
novels. Along with the myth of multiple orgasms. Or so I’d convinced myself
years ago.
Besides, after working all day,
plus taking care of the kids, the shopping, the carpooling, the cooking and the
cleaning, who had the energy to put into even one orgasm most nights? Even for
a drop-dead-gorgeous-although-balding-and-slightly-overweight-yet-still-a-hunk
husband? Faking it was a lot quicker and easier. And gave me a few extra
precious minutes of snooze time.
Still, I thought we’d had a pretty
good marriage compared to most other couples we knew, a marriage built on trust
and communication. In reality what we had was more like blind trust on my part
and a whopping lack of communication on his. Most of all, though, I thought my
husband loved me. Apparently he loved Roxie Roulette more.
Could I have been more clueless if
I’d tried?
The theme from Rocky sang out from inside the armoire. Dead is dead only for the
deceased. The widow, I’m learning, becomes a multitasking juggler of a thousand
and one details. Our phone hadn’t stopped ringing since the call from the hotel
in Las Vegas.
But this wasn’t the home phone. I
opened the armoire and reached for the box of Karl’s personal items the funeral
director had given me. No one had bothered to turn off his phone. The display
read Private Call. “Hello?”
“Put Karl on.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t play games with me, Sweet
Cheeks. Hand the phone to that slippery weasel. Now.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Make it possible. You tell him
Ricardo’s run out of patience, and he’s
run out of time.”
As an auto parts salesman for a
national wholesaler, Karl dealt with his share of lowlife Neanderthals, but
Ricardo sounded lower than most of the run-of-the mill Neanderthals in the auto
industry.
I wasn’t in the mood for any
macho-posturing Soprano wannabe. “If
this concerns an order you placed, you’ll have to get in touch with the main
office in Secaucus. Karl passed away last week.”
Silence greeted my statement. At
first I thought Ricardo had hung up. When he finally spoke, I wished he had.
“No kidding?”
“Your sense of humor might be that
warped, but I can assure you, mine isn’t.”
“This his missus?” He sounded
suspicious.
“Yes.”
“Look, I’m sorry about your loss,”
he said, although his tone suggested otherwise, “but I got my own problems.
That schmuck was into me for fifty
G’s. We had a deal, and dead or not, he’s gotta pay up. Capisce?”
Hardly. But I now sensed that
Ricardo was no body shop owner. “Who are you?”
“Let’s just say I’m a former
business associate of the deceased. One you just inherited, Sweet Cheeks. Along
with his debt.”
I glanced at the bathroom door.
Thankfully, Lucille’s three-minute shower was running overtime. I lowered my
voice. “I don’t know anything about a debt, and I certainly don’t have fifty
thousand dollars.”
Although both statements were true,
after what I had recently learned about my husband’s secret life, he probably
did owe Ricardo fifty thousand dollars, the same fifty thousand dollars the
casino manager in Las Vegas said Karl gambled away shortly before cashing in
his chips—literally—at that roulette table.
But what really freaked me out as I
stood half-naked in nothing more than my black panties and matching bra, was
the thought that there could be other Ricardos waiting to pounce. Lots of other
Ricardos. Behind my husband’s upstanding, church-going, family-oriented façade,
he had apparently hidden a shitload of secrets. What next?
Ricardo wasn’t buying into my
ignorance. “I happen to know otherwise, Sweet Cheeks, so don’t try to con me.
I’ll be over in an hour to collect.”
There are five stages of grief. I’d
gone through the first stage, denial, so fast, I hardly remembered being there.
For most of the past week, I’d silently seethed over Karl’s duplicity. With
each new deceit I’d uncovered, my anger grew exponentially. I knew Stage Two,
anger, would be sticking around for a long time to come, sucking dry all the
love I once had for my husband.
Ricardo became that proverbial last
straw on my overburdened camel’s back. “You’ll do no such thing,” I screamed
into the phone. “I don’t know who you are or what kind of sick game you’re
playing, but if you bother me again, I’m calling the police. Capisce?”
Ricardo’s voice lowered to a
menacing timbre. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Sweet Cheeks.” The phone
went dead. Along with every nerve in my body.
And I thought I had problems
before?
“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” squawked Ralph. “Julius Caesar. Act Three, Scene Two.”
No Polly wants a cracker for this bird. Ralph spouts Shakespeare and
only Shakespeare, thanks to several decades of listening to Great-aunt Penelope
Periwinkle’s classroom lectures. When Aunt Penelope died two years ago, I
inherited the parrot with the uncanny knack for squawking
circumstance-appropriate quotes.
Could have been worse. At least
Aunt Penelope wasn’t a closet rap queen with a bird who squawked about pimpin’
the hos in the ‘hood. I’m also grateful Ralph is housebroken, considering his
ability to pick the lock on his cage.
“I’ve already cried enough to
replenish New Jersey’s drought-lowered reservoirs, Ralph. So unless you know of
some way to transform tears into twenties, I’ve got to move on and figure a way
out of this mess.”
He ignored me. Ralph speaks only when he wants to, and right now his attention
had turned to grooming himself. Like I said, I hate whiners, but jeez! How much
simpler life would be if my only concern was molting feathers.
(from Assault With a Deadly Glue Gun by Lois
Winston)
My Book Review:
Who could pass up reading an intriguing collection of 10 full-length cozy mysteries featuring murder, mayhem, and zany capers from amateur female sleuths?!
Since I enjoyed reading all ten mystery tales in the Sleuthing Women Collection, I decided to only provide a general book review instead of individual reviews.
Sleuthing Women is an eclectic collection of first-in-series mystery collection from authors Lois Winston, Jonnie Jacobs, Judy Alter, Maggie Toussaint, Camille Minichino, RP Dahlke, Susan Santangelo, Mary Kennedy, Heather Haven, and Vinnie Hanse. Each mystery story has a balanced mixture of murder and mayhem that will appeal to everyone. Each of the authors weave an intriguing, unique, and thoroughly enjoyable full length mystery with engaging characters, a variety of settings, and enough drama, humor, mystery, and suspense that will easily draw the reader into each story, keep them turning the pages, and leave them wanting more.
Sleuthing Women is the perfect first-in-series mystery collection that will certainly peak your interest, and whet your appetite to read the rest of the mysteries in each of the individual authors' series.
RATING: 4 STARS
About The Authors
Lois Winston
Jonnie Jacobs
Judy Alter
Maggie Toussaint
Camille Minichino
RP Dahlke
Susan Santangelo
Mary Kennedy
Heather Haven
Vinnie Hansen
Contest Giveaway
Virtual Book Tour
Tour Schedule:
May 9 – 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, & Sissy, Too! – EXCERPT
May 10 – Leigh Anderson Romance – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
May 11 – Back Porchervations – REVIEW
May 11 – A Holland Reads – CHARACTER GUEST POST
May 12 – fundinmental – GUEST POST
May 13 – Cassidy Salem Reads & Writes – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
May 14 – Laura’s interests – REVIEW, CHARACTER GUEST POST
May 15 – Queen of All She Reads – REVIEW, GUEST POST
May 16 – Jersey Girl Book Reviews – REVIEW
May 17 – Teresa Trent Author Site – INTERVIEW
May 18 – Island Confidential – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
May 19 – Ashleyz Wonderland – CHARACTER GUEST POST
May 20 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT
May 21 – StoreyBook Reviews – REVIEW
May 22- Brooke Blogs – REVIEW
How great to be on the Jersey Girl site -- Thanks!
ReplyDeleteHi Camille! Thank you for the opportunity to feature the collection on my blog. :)
DeleteWould love to win this. Sounds so fun.
ReplyDelete