Crime & Mystery Books

Wallace Lake, Ohio, takes care of their own. Unwelcoming of outsiders, the community closes ranks when four women are found murdered along the water’s edge. Agent Luce Hansen of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation must find a way in before another woman loses her life to the ruthless serial killer.
 
With the help of her new team—a hot rookie and a smart, beautiful medical examiner—Luce uncovers a ring of devotion surrounding the prime suspect. As Luce works to unearth the dark secrets of this close-knit town, she learns to what extraordinary lengths people will go to protect the ones they love. And when Luce feels forsaken, both professionally and personally, she must regain trust in her most valuable investigative tool: herself.

Micky Knight reluctantly takes on two cases, one for money, one for pity. The first is a trawl though archives to solve a century old murder, for an arrogant grandson who thinks riches should absolve his family of any sins. The other, to answer a mother’s anguish as she tries to understand her daughter’s suicide. Micky sees no happy ending to either case; the dusty pages of history aren’t going to give up their secrets after holding them for so long. And even if she finds answers for the mother’s questions, nothing will bring her daughter back. But as Micky discovers, the past is never past and a young girl can lead a complicated, even dangerous, life. The secrets, both past and present, are meant to remain hidden—only the first murder is hard. The rest come easy.

Attorney Elizabeth Campbell turned her back on her silver spoon upbringing and finds emotional fulfillment in her work at a nonprofit legal clinic, much to the dismay of her parents.

Her propensity for bending the law, as well as uttering a few choice phrases, makes her pairing with a Catholic priest to investigate the case of a simple man with an IQ of a child, who confessed to a brutal killing, a challenge. But solving a gruesome murder is not even her greatest trial—it’s her growing attraction to sexy but cranky Detective Grace Donovan who is hell-bent on keeping her client in prison.

While chasing a mystery that found its way from the concentration camps of WWII to an abandoned Catholic school, Elizabeth and Grace struggle to set personal boundaries, as their relationship slowly evolves from one of hostility to indifference, to something neither wishes to define.

Advance praise from Foreword Reviews:

"A thematically compelling journey through a town’s dark underbelly, Sins of Our Fathers, by A. Rose Mathieu, is an excellent blend of mystery and romance....In addition to dealing with an ever-growing stream of murders, [Elizabeth] Campbell must also contend with her feelings for steely yet attractive Detective Grace Donovan....Sins of Our Fathers is excellently paced, introducing characters and situations in a way that allows for their natural extrapolation as the novel progresses. While the case that Campbell is charged with reinvestigating initially appears to be an open-and-shut claim, larger forces are shown to have influenced it. The novel weaves together a political and religious world outside of the courts....Sins of Our Fathers seamlessly blends a ghastly murder mystery with an intriguing romance."

In book three in the Dark Peak series, things are looking up for Detective Sanne Jensen and Dr. Meg Fielding. Dating each other seems to be working, their families are behaving themselves, and the worst of the post-Christmas crime wave is over. 

The discovery of a Pakistani girl’s body out on the moors changes all that. No one knows who she is, who hurt her, or how she came to be there. As pressure mounts on East Derbyshire Special Ops for a quick resolution, it becomes ever more apparent that the case won’t provide one.  

With the Pakistani community closing ranks, and threads of suspicion reaching farther than anyone could have predicted, the investigation leaves Sanne facing an ordeal she may not survive.

New York, 1952. From the shadowy docks of Athens, Greece, to the elegance of a Fifth Avenue penthouse, to the neon glare of Coney Island, art smuggler Cantor Gold must track down an ancient artifact, elude thugs and killers, protect a beautiful woman who caters to Cantor’s deepest desires, and confront the honky-tonk past which formed her. Memories, murder, passion, and the terrible longing for her stolen love tangle in Cantor’s soul, threatening to tear her apart.

Book Three of the Cantor Gold Crime Series

Alissa Reeves came out for Hannah Desarno. Hannah is smart, beautiful, and has just gone missing. Worse, she isn’t Alissa’s first girlfriend to disappear. Eighteen months ago, Alissa was caught kissing bad girl Lana Meyers. Too scared to admit her feelings for Lana, Alissa let her friends blame Lana. Weeks later when Lana disappeared, no one in their small town thought much of it until months later when her body was found.

With Hannah gone, Alissa finds herself following clues that will help her discover what happened to both girls, and the truth will change everything.

Three stories by three talented crime writers—Carsen Taite, Ali Vali, and Michelle Grubb—each packing her own special brand of heat.

In Hammersmith by Michelle Grubb: Officer Belinda Riley knew the signs of a suicide bomber, but this time she was blind to the obvious. This time she didn’t want to believe what was right in front of her eyes.

In Bow and Arrow by Carsen Taite: Bounty hunter Luca Bennett has always lived on the edge of the law, but now she’s living with a cop and doing her darnedest to stay out of trouble. When an old enemy resurfaces, will the shady ways of Luca’s past come back to haunt her? 

In Hell Fire by Ali Vali: Dr. Abigail Eaton stumbles into a massacre, but once someone tries to kill her it seems like no accident. While hunting for the perpetrators of a sex trafficking empire, Agent Riley Abbott saves Abigail from a professional hit and discovers the young mother might be the key to more than just her case. Riley takes Abigail and her family to what she thinks is safer ground, and runs right into the arms of reputed mob boss Cain Casey.

Murder is a seductive story that keeps Detective Jill Rogers hypnotized and soothes her road-hungry feet. Money and murder—the world’s most fascinating subjects. Jill quit romance when she left Sophie Walsh, the love of her life, starved and hurting. Love is for sunny, squishy people, and Jill is dark. 

 A few things Jill knows for sure: the more violent the crime, the closer the relationship is between victim and murderer. Murder investigation is a two-piece puzzle. One piece is the crime scene and it forms half the picture; the other is the witnesses and suspects. Ideally, the two halves come together and form a complete whole and the case is solved. If they don’t, either Jill made a mistake or someone is lying. And she doesn’t make mistakes.

Winter in the Derbyshire Peaks: months of knee-deep snow, short days, and rocketing crime rates.

Detective Sanne Jensen is living in self-imposed isolation and quietly falling apart, while Dr. Meg FieldingSanne's best friend and occasional loveris struggling to cope with her violent brother, who is back in town and demanding money that she doesn't have.

When the murder of a drug addict is dumped onto Sanne's already unmanageable caseload, she suspects the death may be the start of something more sinister. But how can she investigate a crime when no one cares about the victim? And how can she stop a killer who has no identity, no motive, and no conscience?

Jil knew her foster mother, Elise, was sick. So why does her death seem so sudden? Unable to shake the feeling that there's more to this story, Jil begins unearthing secrets. Her quest leads her down unexpected paths teeming with uncomfortable questions about the woman she thought she knew. Why does Elise have stolen art in her home? And where did she get the substantial amount of money she's left Jil in her will? Jil and her lover, Jess, are used to confiding everything, but Jil just can't let Jess into this part of her life. As she gets closer to learning the truth about Elise's past, Jil collides with memories of her own past she thought she'd let go. Did she ever know Elise at all? Can she get a grip on what she's discovered before her silence drives Jess away forever?

New York City, 1950. Cantor Gold, art smuggler and dapper dyke-about-town, hunts for a missing masterpiece she's risked her life to bring through the port of New York. She must outsmart the Law that wants to jail her; outrun the dockside gangsters who would let her take the fall for murder; and outplay a shady art dealer, his lover, and a beautiful curator who toys with Cantor's passion. Through it all, Cantor must stay out of the gunsights of a killer who's knocking off rivals for the missing masterpiece—and stay alive to solve the mystery of her stolen love: Sophie de la Luna y Sol.

Montana rancher Becky Miles (who decidedly drops the Becky part) is drawn into the snake pit of internalized homophobia when she travels to Vermont to find out if her gal, Jane Scott, still loves her. Jane's life is enmeshed by old guilt and compassion for Georgia, whose horse training business is tarnished by a tragic death in her barn. Miles has little patience for Georgia, a closeted lesbian who is desperate to pass among the upper crust of the horse show world. Neither Jane nor Miles has any idea, at first, just how desperate Georgia is to pass in the straight world.

Agent Luce Hansen returns home to Willow's Ridge to catch a serial killer who has been murdering young women. It's the case she's been waiting for, the case that compels her to return to the small town she turned her back on nineteen years ago, the case she plans to ride from the Ohio BCI all the way to the FBI.

The case worth risking her shaky relationship with her lover, Rowan. But the horrors of the case recall the unsolved murder of Luce's first girlfriend, and Luce is forced to confront the local ex-gay ministry that haunted her youth. When the past crosses the present, will Luce lose everything she's worked so hard to build?

"I can't do this. I can't do any of this without her."

Detective Sanne Jensen (not blonde, not tall, definitely not Scandinavian) and Dr. Meg Fielding (scruffy, scatterbrained, prone to swearing at patients) are lifelong best friends, sharing the same deprived background and occasionally the same bed.When a violent kidnapping stuns the Peak District village of Rowlee, both women become involved in the case.

As Sanne and her colleagues in East Derbyshire Special Ops search for the culprit, and Meg fights to keep his victim alive, a shocking discovery turns the investigation on its head. With the clock ticking, Sanne and Meg find themselves pushed closer by a crime that threatens to tear everything apart.

Dayle Salvesen, a bestselling spy novelist from Wisconsin, arrives in London for a writers' conference only to be told that her best friend and former lover, Celia Frost, has died under mysterious circumstances. Or has she? There's no sign of Celia's body, and Celia's flat contains items suggesting she planned to travel. Dayle joins forces with Celia's ex-girlfriend, Nigerian-British university lecturer Edwina Adebayo, to investigate. Hampering their efforts is Detective Constable Andrea Callaway, who claims that Celia, who ran a refugee center, profited financially from her work rescuing trafficked sex slaves.

The deeper Dayle and Edwina dig, the more Dayle questions not only how well she knew Celia, but also how well she knows herself.

Billiwack, California, 1884. When translator Rosetta Stein comes across her rival, Bartholomew Vincent, under attack by weird, raven-headed man-beasts behind the infamous Puckered Rosebud Gentleman's Club, she senses opportunity. She rescues him in exchange for a crack at the commission he stole from under her nosea strangely inscribed artifact found by Big Sur bigwig George Taylor Granville in the Santa Lucia mountains. Misfortune has stalked Vincent from the moment he took on the project, and he's only too happy to share it. In the meantime, a lady marshal has come to Billiwack, investigating rumors of strange, unlicensed weapons, and she can't seem to decide if she'd rather kiss Rosetta or arrest her. And Vincent is suffering romantic complications of his own, in the forms of Rosetta's charming layabout brother, and an amorous professor who won't take God, no! for an answer.

Journalist Jane Scott finds herself drawn into a world of violence. Horses are being murdered for their insurance value and stolen to sell with new identities. Jane uses her journalist skills in an attempt to expose the growing horror taking place in the seemingly benign horse show circles of the wealthy. When she gets too close to the truth, her own horses disappear from her farm. Is it a warning that she's getting too close to the truth?

Jane unexpectedly meets Miles, a woman who finds her at the feet of a beautiful black Trakehner mare, which Jane calls Night. Jane falls for Miles in more ways than one. But the men Jane is trying to stop are determined she will not expose their lucrative horse theft ring. Can she expose them before they come after her?

Faye Blakemore is a photojournalist for a major New York newspaper. Faye has been taking photos since she was a small child, taught by her photographer grandfather, after spending hours in the strange blood-red light of his darkroom. Now Faye specializes in what one reviewer calls, "blood-and-guts journalism." Her first book of photos is as celebrated as it is controversial—and as harrowing.

Faye convinces her editor to send her to Afghanistan and the Congo to report on the acid burnings, the machete attacks, and the women survivors. Yet that series of assignments—each darker and more dangerous than the next—brings Faye closer to her both her own demons and to the family secrets that still haunt her and threaten to destroy her and the woman she loves.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award (Lesbian Mystery) and the IPPY Bronze Medal (Horror).