When the body of Joe Rose, a precious-metals assayer, turns up trampled behind her saloon, Inez Stannert is asked by the victim's widow to help settle his affairs, a job that leads Inez into a web of skewed assays, counterfeit money, blackmail, and murder.

It is 1880 and the railroad is coming to town. Former President Ulysses S. Grant arrives along with the train to celebrate the event and look into possible investments. Inez is dealing with the problem of her missing husband while trying to maintain ownership of the saloon. She makes a backroom deal with the local madam, Frisco Flo, hoping to gain some money of her own. When the body of one of Flo?s girls turns up, mud starts flying, accompanied in...

It's autumn of 1881, and Inez Stannert, still the co-owner of Leadville, Colorado's Silver Queen saloon, is settled in San Francisco with her young ward, Antonia Gizzi. Until a body washes up on the filthy banks of San Francisco's Mission Creek canal.

First book in the Posadas County Mystery Series When a series of crimes disrupts the tranquil community in Posadas County, New Mexico, a group of small-town cops will have to fight for their lives to keep the county safe Posadas County, New Mexico, has very few mean streets and no city-slick cop shop. But it has an earnest, elected County Sheriff and his aging Undersheriff-William C. Gastner. Pushing sixty, widower Bill has no other life than in...

Pets are vanishing mysteriously across the mountain community of Mason Country, Virginia. Feral canines roam at night, attacking livestock. Is an illegal dog fighting ring at work? Rachel makes enemies by trying to save the feral dogs.

Tom Bridger, who is half Melungeon, left his small mountain community to escape the lingering prejudice against the mixed race group. Now, in the face of family tragedy, he has returned and taken on his father's job as a county sheriff's deputy. The bones of a Melungeon woman have surfaced and all evidence points to murder. The victim's poor family and the wealthy white family she married into scramble to protect their secrets from Tom's probing....

When Pru Marlowe gets the call that there's been a cat shooting, she's furious. Animal brutality is the one thing that this tough animal psychic won't stand for, and she's determined to care for the traumatized pet. But when Pru finds out that the cat did the shooting-accidentally setting off a rare dueling pistol-she realizes something else is going on. Could the white Persian really have killed her owner? Or did the whole bloody mess have something...

When veterinarian Rachel Goddard and Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger take teenagers on an outing to clean up roadside trash in rural Mason County, Virginia, they make a grisly discovery: the plastic-wrapped body of a young woman. One teen peers at the face through the plastic and screams. The dead girl is her sister, Shelley, a law student who has been missing for a month. As Tom launches the investigation, Rachel copes with a visit from her own sister,...

What does a woman do when she discovers her husband is an incurable cheater? If she's Cat DeLuca, she launches the Pants On Fire Detective Agency to do what two years of unholy matrimony taught her: she catches cheaters. After client Cleo Jones shoots her cheating husband's bum full of buckshot, he disappears, taking her money, her dog, and her sister with him. Cat promises to return the dog and money if her client stops shooting at Walter. She finds...

He's a man we know only as "the columnist." He writes for a newspaper in Seattle, isn't afraid to stir up trouble, and keeps his life-including his multiple lovers and his past-in safe compartments. But it's all about to be violently upended when he goes out on what seems like the most mundane of assignments, looking into a staid company that "never makes news." The moment one of his sources takes a dive off a downtown skyscraper, the columnist is...