New Releases by Charlotte MacLeod

The curtains almost close on an actor in this cozy gardening club mystery featuring amateur sleuth Dittany Henbit and her husband, Osbert Monk. When Jenson Thorbisher-Freep announces an amateur theatrical contest, the women in the Grub-and-Stake gardening club race to join in. They enlist Osbert Monk as their playwright—not only is he married to their club leader Dittany Monk, but he’s famous the world over as Lex Laramie, bestselling novelist of Westerns. Taking the legend of Dangerous Dan McGrew as his inspiration, Osbert delivers a rough draft faster than the Pony Express. Now all the Grub-and-Stakers have to do is cast it. To play McGrew, Dittany picks town cad Andrew McNaster, who has recently improved his manners in an attempt to woo Osbert’s aunt, Arethusa. The gunslinger’s performance gets a bit too real on opening night, though, when his prop bullets are replaced with real ones, and claim the toe of a fellow thespian. Is McNaster as nice as he pretends to be? Or has he taken his part too close to heart, and decided to become very dangerous indeed?

A widowed gardener meets a ghost from frontier times who’s out for revenge: “The screwball mystery is Charlotte MacLeod’s cup of tea” (Chicago Tribune). Zilla Trott is pouring her cat some chamomile tea when the drifter appears in her kitchen. He is grubby and crude—not at all the kind of person you’d usually find in the pleasant town of Lobelia Falls—but something about him intrigues the aging widow. Perhaps it’s his rugged good looks, or the way he seems to come from another time and place. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s been dead for nearly a century. When Lobelia Falls was in its rough-and-tumble frontier infancy, Hiram Jellyby was the best mule driver the town had ever seen, until an argument over a hidden cache of gold left him bleeding to death in a back alley. He returns in spectral form to secure a proper burial, and finds that in modern-day Lobelia Falls, no one knows more about turning the soil than Zilla Trott’s gardening buddies—all members of Dittany Monk’s fearless Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club.

When the seeds of a mystery are planted, gardening club member Dittany Henbit digs up clues in the cozy series from the international bestselling author. The Grub-and-Stakers gardening club has traditionally limited its activities to serving tea and gossiping about wildflowers, but when water department supervisor John Architrave is found murdered in the woods, club member Dittany Henbit turns to solving mysteries. After Architrave’s will reveals that he bequeathed his ramshackle old house to the Grub-and-Stakers, with instructions for it to be turned into a museum, Dittany resigns herself to weeks of cleaning out the mansion and sorting through donated town “artifacts.” The task turns interesting, however, the minute bodies start falling from the sky. The new curator is airing out the house’s attic when he takes his tumble off the roof. So unlikely is it that he would fall out the tiny attic window, that Dittany has no choice but to attempt to add one captured killer to the young museum’s permanent collection.

A museum robbery leaves a guard dead, and two Boston sleuths investigate: “If this is your first meeting with Sarah Kelling, oh how I envy you” (Margaret Maron). It’s only been a few months since Sarah Kelling’s elderly husband passed away, and she’s struggling to adapt to life as a penniless young widow. To make ends meet, she converts her stately Boston home into a boardinghouse, a decision that brings something even better than money: the company of art-fraud investigator Max Bittersohn. The budding couple is standing on a balcony, recovering from a second-rate concert at a third-rate museum, when something plummets past them. The museum has been robbed, and a guard has fallen to his death. Dozens of priceless paintings have been stolen and replaced with forgeries, and recovering these masterworks will mean tearing the lid off the quiet life of the Boston upper crust. But it’s a chance Sarah and Max must take, lest they join the guard on his long trip down.

Murder upstages a Kelling family theatrical production—and Boston’s art sleuths are on the case. “The screwball mystery is Charlotte MacLeod’s cup of tea” (Chicago Tribune). Producing a Gilbert & Sullivan opera requires a special kind of madness, and the Kelling family is large enough and peculiar enough to undertake an entire company by themselves. For years now, Sarah Kelling’s Aunt Emma has supervised these annual productions—from The Pirates of Penzance to The Mikado—and this year she has invited her cast of relatives to rehearse The Sorcerer in her stately mansion. The show is nearly ready when a team of burglars drugs the cast and crew to make off with a priceless portrait. Theft or no theft, Aunt Emma insists the show must go on. Even when one of the cast dies suddenly, she finds a replacement and continues rehearsal. But when Sarah begins to suspect the actor was murdered, it becomes clear that dear Aunt Emma may be in danger of taking her final bow.

An aging stripper’s fresh corpse turns up in an old family tomb at Boston Common in this “first-rate suspense whodunit” (The Cincinnati Post). Like many old New England families, the Kellings live to die. Although their family vault is spacious and comfortable, it will not do for Sarah Kelling’s Great-Uncle Frederick. In his will, he demands to be buried inside the ancient family tomb at Boston Common, which hasn’t admitted a new member in over a century. But when the Kellings crack the old vault’s door, they find a recently built brick wall—and behind it lays a surprisingly fresh corpse, a skeleton with rubies in its teeth. Her name was Ruby Redd, and many years ago she was the toast of Boston’s burlesque scene. Her murder case is ice cold, but when Sarah begins investigating it, she finds that the fiery passions behind Ruby’s death still burn white hot. With the help of art-fraud investigator Max Bittersohn, Sarah will solve the mystery of the stripper’s murder—or take her own place in the family vault.

Boston’s married art sleuths are about to discover that you can’t fake a murder: “Entertaining . . . good humored . . . Sarah and Max are a winning team” (Baltimore Sun). If she weren’t so fabulous, the Countess Lydia Ouspenska might be considered a gangster’s moll. The last time she met Max Bittersohn, Boston’s famed art-fraud investigator, she was forging minute Byzantine masterpieces to make ends meet. But when Max bumps into her on the Common, the Countess is back on her feet. She has taken up with Bartolo Arbalest, a master forger currently masquerading as an art restorer. And as Bittersohn knows all too well, even the most genteel fraudster cannot be trusted. With the help of his wife, Sarah, Max looks for the secret lair of Bartolo’s supposed restoration guild. But when the guild’s clients begin to die, it becomes clear there is more at stake than a few fabricated icons. The art may be fake, but for Max and Sarah the danger is very real.

A “funny and exciting” mystery in the series featuring a husband-and-wife sleuthing team in Boston (Publishers Weekly). Boston and its suburbs are stuffed with Kellings, and the city is about to get one more. Sarah Kelling and her husband Max Bittersohn—a pair of amateur sleuths equally at home in back alleys as they are at black-tie balls—are about to have a baby. And if the child takes after his parents, he will be one of the cleverest infants in New England. But while Sarah is a month away from giving birth, she cannot let pregnancy slow her down—she has a murder to solve. A resident at one of Sarah’s Uncle Dolph’s homeless centers is found mugged and murdered on one of Boston’s seedier side streets. Someone at the shelter has been dealing drugs, and plans to frame Uncle Dolph for the murder. Now Sarah and Max must race to clear Dolph’s name, lest the newest Kelling arrive before his family honor can be restored.

A Canadian Mountie and his family take a trip to Wales where ancient rituals prove deadly—from an author “in the top rank of modern mystery fiction” (Elizabeth Peters). For mounted policeman Madoc Rhys and his wife, Janet, the pains of traveling with an infant are worth taking young Dorothy to Wales for Great-Uncle Sir Caradoc’s ninetieth birthday. Along with every other member of the Rhys clan, they make the pilgrimage to the ancestral pile, to enjoy a few days of drinks, dinner, and—as it turns out—demonic sacrifices. On their first morning at the family manor, Madoc stumbles upon a concussed shepherd and a dismembered ram. It appears to be a botched attempt at an ancient rite, executed by one of those Welshmen who still carry a torch for the religion of the druids. For a spot of fun, the Rhys family decides to stage its own ritual—recreating the fertility ceremony of the Beltane bonfires. But when the flames turn a member of his family into a fireball, Madoc springs to action. Even five thousand miles from Canada, a Mountie always gets his man.

A Canadian Mountie investigates a murder among musicians in this mystery by the Edgar Award–nominated author of the Peter Shandy series. Although he is a decorated officer of the Mounted Police, Madoc Rhys’s tin ear has long been an embarrassment to his musically fixated family. But when his father’s orchestra needs a policeman, the Mountie gets a chance to make daddy proud. It began as pranks among the brass instruments, but something is rotten inside the Wagstaffe Symphony, and is about to graduate to something criminal. Called in to look into the tensions within the group, Madoc arrives just in time to see the French horn player keel over. The death appears natural, and the orchestra boards the plane to its next engagement. But when a storm forces them to make an emergency landing and take shelter in an eerie old lodge, the extent of the danger becomes clear. Madoc may never understand music, but he has a good ear for murder, and is about to show off his chops.

Long-lost relatives and priceless jewels turn a wedding upside down For all the Kellings’ quirks, no other family in Boston is more adept at throwing a wedding. So when Max Bittersohn’s wife, Sarah Kelling, offers to organize his nephew’s nuptials, Max is smart enough to stay out of her way. But when the art-fraud investigator stumbles onto a family mystery, he is drawn into something far more serious than the question of who will catch the bouquet. Stolen years earlier, the priceless Kelling jewels were last seen in Amsterdam, so how did they end up among the wedding gifts? Max is trying to answer that question when a talkative burglar wallops him with a shovel in a failed attempt to rip off the rubies. Then, as the reception winds down, a hot-air balloon lands on the wedding tent, spilling out the Zickerys, a branch of the Kelling clan who prove even odder than the original strain. Family weddings are never easy, but for Max Bittersohn, this one could be murder.

The Mystery Fancier, Volume Seven Number One, January-February 1983, contains: "Captain Joseph T. Shaw''s Black Mask Scrapbook," by E. R. Hagemann, "Detection by Other Means," by Bob Sampson, "Joe Orton''s and Tom Stoppard''s Burlesques of the Detective Genre," by Earl F. Bargainnier, "Bloody Balaclava: Charlotte MacLeod''s Campus Comedy Mysteries," by Jane S. Bakerman and "Spy Series Characters in Hardback, Part XIII," by Barry Van Tilburg.

This is the definitive Charlotte MacLeod collection, filled with the humour, plot twists and whimsy that have made her known and celebrated worldwide.

Im Blaclava County verschwindet der Experte für Milchwirtschaft spurlos. Ein verzwickter Fall für Peter Shandy.