Recommendations based on "Still Dead"

The second spirited mystery in the New York Times bestselling Paws & Claws series.Wagtail, Virginia, the top pet-friendly getaway in the United States, is gearing up for a howling good Halloween—until a spooky murder shakes the town to its core..Holly Miller doesn’t believe in spirits, but the Sugar Maple Inn is filled with guests who do. The TV series in development, Apparition Apprehenders, has descended on Wagtail’s annual Halloween festivities to investigate supernatural local legends, and Holly has her hands full showing the ghost hunters a scary-fun time.But the frights turn real when Holly’s Jack Russell, Trixie, and kitten, Twinkletoes, find a young woman drowned in the Wagtail Springs Hotel’s bathhouse—the spot of the town’s most infamous haunting. The crime scene is eerily similar to the creepy legend, convincing Holly that the death wasn’t just accidental. Now she’ll have to race to catch a flesh-and-blood killer—before someone else in town gives up the ghost...Delicious recipes for owners and pets included!

J is for Jaffe: Wendell Jaffe, dead these past five years. Or so it seemed until his former insurance agent spotted him in the bar of a dusty little resort halfway between Cabo San Lucas and La Paz. In truth, the facts about Wendell Jaffe had nothing to do with my family history, but murder is seldom tidy and no one ever said revelations operate in a straight line. It was my investigation into the dead man's past that triggered the inquiry into my own, and in the end the two stories became difficult to separate. Five years ago, when Jaffe's thirty-five-foot Fuji ketch was found drifting off the Baja coast, it seemed a sure thing he'd gone overboard. The note he left behind admitted he was flat broke, his business bankrupt, his real estate gambit nothing but a huge Ponzi scheme about to collapse, with criminal indictment certain to follow. When the authorities soon after descended on his banks and his books, there was nothing left: Jaffe had stripped the lot. Given my insatiable curiosity and my natural inclination to poke my nose in where it doesn't belong, it was odd to realize how little attention I'd paid to my own past. I'd simply accepted what I was told, constructing my personal mythology on the flimsiest of facts. But Jaffe wasn't quite without assets. There was the $500,000 life insurance policy made out to his wife and underwritten by California Fidelity. With no corpse to prove death, however, the insurance company was in no hurry to pay the claim. Dana Jaffe had to wait out the statutory five years until her missing husband could be declared legally dead. Just two months before Wendell Jaffe was sighted in that dusty resort bar, California Fidelity finally paid in full.Now they wanted the truth. And they were willing to hire Kinsey Millhone to dig it up. As Kinsey pushes deeper into the mystery surrounding Wendell Jaffe's pseudocide, she explores her own past, discovering that in family matters as in crime, sometimes it's better to reserve jud

The most dramatic installment yet in the Nero Award-winning Pentecost and Parker series, as Will scrambles to solve a shocking murder before Lillian takes the fall for the crime. NEW YORK CITY, 1947: Wealthy financier and ghoulish connoisseur of crime, Jessup Quincannon, is dead, and famed detective Lillian Pentecost is under arrest for his murder. Means, motive, and a mountain of evidence leave everyone believing she's guilty. Everyone, that is, except Willowjean "Will" Parker, who knows for a fact her boss is innocent. She just doesn't know if she can prove it. With Lillian locked away in the House of D--New York City's infamous women's prison--Will is left to root out the real killer. Was it a member of Quincannon's murder-obsessed Black Museum Club? Maybe it was his jilted lover? Or his beautiful, certainly-sociopathic bodyguard? And what about the mob hit-man who just happened to disappear after the shots were fired? With the city barreling toward the trial of the century, each day brings fresh headlines and hints of long-buried scandals from Lillian's past. Will is desperate to get her boss out from behind bars before her reputation is destroyed. Because the House of D is no kind place, especially for a woman with multiple sclerosis. Or one with so many enemies. Her health failing and being targeted by someone who wants her dead, Lillian needs to survive long enough to take the stand. With time running out on both sides of the prison walls, Will and Lillian must wager everything to uncover who put their thumb on the scales and a bullet in Quincannon's head. Before Lady Justice brings her sword down, ending Pentecost and Parker's adventures once and for all.

Local politics gets nasty when Rosewood, Georgia, elects a new mayor, and the honorable Spence Jefferies makes it his first order of business to replace Diane Fallon with an incompetent crony as head of the crime lab. But just as Diane is adjusting to life without murder, a double whammy hits - Within a twenty-four-hour period, the newly appointed chief of police and the mayor himself are shot dead.

An e-original short story from New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance, featuring a sneak peek of the next J. P. Beaumont novel, Den of Iniquity—Twinkle Winkleman finds herself in a dangerous, life-threatening situation, and love forces her to confront the near-impossible. A skilled mechanic and certified spitfire, Twinkle Winkleman is as hard as nails; she has to be with a name like hers. Twinkle learned everything there is to know about cars from her time in her daddy’s garage in Anchorage, and when her father dies, she gains ownership of the shop and Maude, her dad’s prized 1973 International Harvester Travelall. Life has not been kind to Twinkle: she grew up without her mother, her daddy’s gone, her ex-husband betrayed her, and her son Tad was killed after a trip to Seattle to handle some “unfinished business.” Right now, the only things Twinkle truly cares for are her garage, Maude, and Cindy—her daughter-in-law and Tad’s widow. One evening, Cindy and her friend, Leslie, have a girls’ night out at the local karaoke bar. Even though neither Twinkle nor Cindy are fans of Leslie’s boyfriend, James, Twinkle is happy to see her daughter-in-law enjoying her freedom and a night on the town. That is until she wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers Cindy hasn’t come home. Even more concerning, she isn’t picking up her phone. What follows is a mother-in-law’s desperate and bold attempt to find her daughter-in-law—even if it means leading the dangerous search on her own, with a little help from J. P. Beaumont. As an Alaskan Winter rears its head, Twinkle is up against the clock: will she be able to save the person that means the most to her?

In Victoria Laurie's latest Psychic Eye Mystery, Abby Cooper learns that following the money often leads to murder.... When Abby is sent to Los Angeles to help train FBI officers to use their intuition, she encounters a case that only she can solve: a series of bank robberies in which the thieves made off with loads of cash but left no clues. Abby's sixth sense leads her team to a tract of land recently cleared for development, where she gets a vision of four buried bodies. However, a site search turns up only ancient bones and pottery from an American Indian tribe, which is enough to delay construction for years. With a furious developer and dubious FBI agents on her back, Abby is losing credibility fast. But Abby's talent rarely leads her astray, and if the bodies aren't there yet, that means four deaths can still be stopped. She'll just have to dig a little deeper....

Alice Rogers, an elderly widow, is dead, found murdered in the Arizona desert. It's easy enough to pin the killing on the teens caught driving her car across the Mexican border, but Sheriff Brady isn't about to let it go at that. Alice was something of a free spirit, with a penchant for Scotch, the glitter of Las Vegas, and a romance with a man twenty years her junior. Her hot-tempered daughter Susan suspects Mom's boyfriend -- her former handyman who moved in instead of moving on when he finished his handy work. Now Susan's furious at her brother Clete, the do-nothing mayor of Tombstone, blaming him for not protecting their inheritance by breaking up their mother's winter romance. Yet all is not as it appears to be, and Joanna is forced to put her personal life on hold to dig deeper into Alice's death, the lives of her greedy offspring, and the identity of her mysterious gentleman friend. And as the investigation gets sidetracked by ugly local land disputes, it takes some troublesome twists and turns, until Sheriff Brady finds herself wading through a murky morass of graft and corruption that may have given someone reason to kill -- and kill again. "Joanna Brady is a delightful character." -- Chicago Tribune "J.A. Jance is among the best--if not the best--mystery novelists writing today." -- Chattanooga Times "Jance is one of those authors who makes readers feel as ifthey lived all their lives in the setting of which she writes." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer

Darla Pettistone may have inherited her great aunt Dee’s Brooklyn bookstore, but it’s the store’s mascot—an oversized black cat named Hamlet—who acts like he owns the place. And when someone turns up dead, Hamlet smells something rotten in Brooklyn…As the owner of Pettistone’s Fine Books, Darla is settling nicely into her new life, even reaching an uneasy truce with Hamlet. Unfortunately, when she needs to hire a new clerk, the finicky feline decides to lend a paw to the hiring process. He chases away applicants who don’t meet his approval, finally settling on an unlikely candidate: Robert, a book-loving Goth kid who has a secret only Hamlet knows.And Hamlet can’t seem to stay out of trouble. One of the bookstore’s regular customers, a man who is renovating a local brownstone, claims he’s seen Hamlet prowling the neighborhood. When the man’s business partner is found dead, Darla discovers that Hamlet may have been the only witness to what could be murder. With the crafty cat’s help, she wonders if they just might be able to pounce on a killer...

When the body of a middle-aged woman is found hanging from a yew tree in Stokeworthy Churchyard, the police suspect foul play. But the victim is an unlikely one. Pauline Brent was the local doctor's receptionist, respected and well liked. She seems to have no real enemies-and yet someone killed her.Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson, a black detective recently transferred to the quiet, West Country English village, is determined to discover the truth and, once again, it is history that provides him with a clue. For Wesley's archaeologist friend, Neil Watson, has excavated an ancient corpse at a nearby dig: a woman who had been buried at a crossroads, on unhallowed ground. It appears that the body is that of the same woman whom local legend has it was publicly executed in the churchyard centuries before.A chilling echo of the fifteenth-century lynching, Pauline Brent's death forces Wesley to consider the possibility that the killer also knows the tree's dark history. Has Pauline been "executed" rather than murdered-and if so, for what crime?To catch a dangerous killer, Wesley has to discover as much as he can about the victim. But Pauline Brent appears to have been a woman with few friends, no relatives, and a past she has tried carefully to hide...

A case from the past Could change their future New chief of police Jake Love is just settling in when information on a cold case pops up. Bringing closure to the murder at Vincent Vineyard is his top priority. And having his girlfriend, Ella Bowman, at his side helping with the investigation should have drawn them even closer. But when Ella’s connection to the powerful family leads to threats, the truth’s revelation might destroy them both.  From Harlequin Intrigue: Seek thrills. Solve crimes. Justice served. Discover more action-packed stories in the West Coast Crime series. All books are stand-alone with uplifting endings but were published in the following order: Book 1: The Heart-Shaped Murders Book 2: Danger in the Nevada Desert Book 3: Homicide at Vincent Vineyard