Honestly Dearest, You're Dead


Book Description

A Safe Place for Dying, the first in Jack Fredrickson's highly acclaimed Dek Elstrom mystery series, was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. Now, Chicago P.I. Dek Elstrom is back in an electrifying new mystery. A lawyer calls Dek with a fast, seven-hundred dollar proposition. A dead client named Dek to execute her will. No matter that Dek didn't know the woman. No matter, too, that the woman's estate was only worth a few hundred. Happens all the time, the lawyer said. To Dek Elstrom, broke and huddling in a cold stone turret in the middle of February, the sound of seven hundred falling down his chimney is louder than his voice of reason. He agrees, heads up to a hamlet ten miles north of nowhere. But instead of finding an easy-to-close estate, he finds blood and the markers of a shattered life. And something worse: links to the darkest part of his own past. He races to chase down leads to the killer, and his own ghost...before the dead woman is killed again.




Honestly Dearest, You're Dead


Book Description

Delighted when an attorney offers him four hundred dollars to execute the will of a dead client, a broke Dek Elstrom finds his seemingly simple case complicated by a race against time with a killer.




A Safe Place for Dying


Book Description

A sly and clever caper among the richest of the rich, A Safe Place for Dying is for fans of Carl Hiaasen and Robert Crais. An extortion letter arrives at Crystal Waters, one of Chicago's wealthiest gated communities. It makes no specific threats, gives no instructions, demands only that $50,000 be gotten ready---chump change for an enclave where the cheapest house is worth three million. It's easy to see it as harmless---a note from a nut. Then a mansion explodes. The homeowners panic, and want it hushed up. If word gets out that a bomber is targeting Crystal Waters, their multimillion-dollar homes will become worthless, a last catastrophe for people strung out from living the good life too well. They hire Dek Elstrom to investigate. Dek Elstrom used to soar high, too, when he lived with his multimillionaire wife at Crystal Waters, but that was before the dominos of his life tipped over and his ex-wife threw him out. Now reduced to living in a crumbling stone turret, bankrupt of everything but attitude, he's not even his own ideal choice for the job. He's too broke, however, to question the motives of a gift-horse client. He needs the money---and the chance to reconnect with his ex-wife. Another bomb goes off, and Dek realizes the culprit must be someone who is angry, needs money, and used to live at Crystal Waters. Then he realizes something else. He himself is the prime suspect.




Now Write! Mysteries


Book Description

The essential handbook for writers of whodunits, techno- thrillers, cozies, and everything in between-featuring never-before- published personal writing exercises from some of today's bestselling and award-winning mystery writers. Now Write! Mysteries, the fourth volume in the acclaimed Now Write! writing guide series, brings together numerous bestselling authors-including winners of and nominees for the Edgar, Hugo, and Shamus awards,-for the definitive guide to writing mysteries, thrillers, and suspense stories. Now Write! Mysteries teaches you everything you've ever wanted to know about crafting a page-turning mystery-from creating a believable detective hero (or terrifying villain), to using real-life cutting-edge investigative techniques to bring your story to life-with practical exercises taken directly from the pros: Discover the best techniques for seamlessly integrating action into your story with John Lutz, New York Times-bestselling author of Urge to Kill, Night Kills, and Serial. Learn how to fine-tune your sense of place and setting with Louise Penny, New York Times-bestselling author of the Armand Gamache mysteries. Take advice from Lorenzo Carcaterra, author of Sleepers and writer/producer for Law & Order, on how to compose a scene that lives up to your character's backstory. Let Marcia Talley, Agatha- and Anthony-winning author of the Hannah Ives mysteries, show you how to build a memorable, engaging detective. (Hint: It's not about making him flawless.) Others included are: Simon Brett, Hallie Ephron, Meg Gardiner, Peter James, Christopher G. Moore, Michael Sears, and many others. No other mystery-writing guide offers the road tested wisdom of so many award-winners and bestselling authors in one place.




Hidden Graves


Book Description

“An investigator with a seductive one-two punch—a delectably smart mouth and a delightfully nimble brain.” —William Kent Krueger “Chicago private investigator Dek Elstrom is having a hard time making ends meet, what with the recent collapse of his marriage, the scandal that wrecked his career, and the lack of an actual private investigator’s license. When a woman hires Dek to confirm the whereabouts of three men, Dek’s not exactly in a position to turn down the work, despite his client’s deeply suspicious behavior (Why, for example, does she show up for their meeting wearing an obvious disguise?). When Dek discovers that one of the men is dead and the other two seem to have gone missing, not to mention the fact that the dead man may have taken on a new identity a couple of decades ago, he realizes he’s stumbled onto the kind of case that could resurrect his career―if he can beat a (trumped-up) murder charge, that is. The writing here is splendid, echoing genre veteran Loren D. Estleman, and Dek Elstrom is the kind of guy we genuinely like spending time with.” —Booklist




Tagged for Murder


Book Description

The “well-crafted seventh mystery featuring wily, wise-cracking Chicago PI Dek Elstrom . . . [a] delightfully eccentric detective series” (Publishers Weekly). When the man who’s hired Dek Elstrom disappears, the private investigator’s search for his missing client unearths some shocking findings. The dead man is found spread-eagled on the top of a box car on an abandoned rail siding. He’s dressed in a $2000 suit, yet half his teeth are rotten and his skin is bad. Who was he . . . and how did he end up there? When he’s offered an exorbitant fee to photograph the scene, PI Dek Elstrom doesn’t ask many questions. But his photos reveal something surprising: there’s a witness to the murder, a tagger who’s returned to the scene to paint what he saw. His work quickly disappears. What is it that the mysterious graffiti artist wants the world to know? Then a second body shows up—and the case takes a shocking new twist . . . “There’s a good story here, and perhaps readers as easy going as Dek won’t mind the laid-back pace.”—Booklist Praise for the Dek Elstrom mystery series “An investigator with a seductive one-two punch—a delectably smart mouth and a delightfully nimble brain.”—William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author “Elstrom has lost none of his initial appeal.”—The New York Times “With a gripping plot and a quirky but determined hero, The Confessors’ Club represents another fine effort from an author who excels at every requirement of the genre—and then some.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch




Silence the Dead


Book Description

A body is exhumed—and a long-unsolved murder grows even more mysterious—in this “powerful” crime thriller set in small-town Illinois (Booklist). Seventeen-year-old Betty Jo Dean was abducted and murdered thirty years ago. It took two days to find her body. She was found, fully dressed apart from her slacks, beneath a gnarled, stunted tree, shot in the back of the head. No one was ever charged in her death. Now, following an appeal from one of his constituents, Mayor Mac Bassett has called for the case to be reopened. But when the body is exhumed, it is revealed that the skull, found loose in the coffin, does not belong to Betty Jo. Mac is determined to solve a cold case that’s becoming increasingly confounding. But no one in the small town of Grand Point is talking. Sheriffs, doctors, medical examiners: everyone seems to be warning Mac off. And then people start dying . . .




The Dead Caller from Chicago


Book Description

"Everything I want in a mystery." —Nancy Pearl, National Public Radio on A Safe Place for Dying, A Pearl Pick Dek Elstrom is back. Bad things are surfacing in Rivertown, in a huge hole in a block of bungalows; in the river, where the dam trapped what should never have been in the water. And from the past, where secrets long buried have risen again, to kill. Then comes a phone call from a dead man, and the sudden disappearance of almost everyone Dek ever held close. A trail leads north, to the end of Michigan, past the chop of the angry waters beyond, to an ice swept island most everyone wants to forget. But there are no answers there, just more questions, and another dead man pointing straight back to Rivertown, to the hole, and the dam, and secrets that want to keep killing in The Dead Caller from Chicago.







Never Wager with a Wallflower


Book Description

Never Wager with a Wallflower is the third and final delightful installment in Virginia Heath's Merriwell Sisters Regency rom-com series. Miss Venus Merriwell has been waiting for her prince to come since the tender age of fourteen. She wants a man who is a selfless academic like her, and free from all the wretched vices her gambler father enjoyed far too much before he left the Merriwell sisters practically destitute. Unfortunately, after a slew of romantic disappointments, there is still no sign of that prince at twenty-three and the only one true love of her life is the bursting-at-the-seams orphanage in Covent Garden that she works tirelessly for. An orphanage that desperately needs to expand into the empty building next door. For Galahad Sinclair, gambling isn’t just his life, it’s in his blood. He grew up and learned the trade at his grandfather’s knee in a tavern on the far away banks of the Hudson in New York. But when fate took all that away and dragged him across the sea to London, it made sense to set up shop here. He’s spent five years making a success out of his gaming hall in the sleazy docks of the East End. Enough that he can finally afford to buy the pleasure palace of his dreams—and where better than in the capital’s sinful heart, Covent Garden? The only fly in his ointment is the perfect building he’s just bought to put it in also happens to be right next door to the orphanage run by his cousin’s wife’s youngest sister. A pious, disapproving and unsettling siren he has avoided like the plague since she flattened him five years ago. While Venus and Galahad lock horns over practically everything, and while her malevolent orphans do their darndest to sabotage his lifelong dream, can either of them take the ultimate gamble—and learn to love thy neighbor?