Carolyn Hart Knihy

Things in the town of Stone's Throw, South Carolina, rarely get much spicier than the extra red pepper Lucy Nan Pilgrim sprinkles into her homemade cheese straws. So when an elderly but surprisingly childlike woman calling herself Shirley shows up on Lucy's doorstep looking for her mama, Lucy thinks it must be another of her friend Ellis's pranks. But Ellis doesn't know a thing about it, and what's more, the two suspect the woman might be Ellis's cousin, Florence, who disappeared as a child more than fifty years earlier.When the mysterious woman vanishes from Lucy's house, she and Ellis don't know what to think. And considering that Calpernia Hemphill, the town's theater and music aficionado, has just been found dead of an apparent fall from the tower at Bertram's Folly, life in Stone's Throw suddenly seems less safe than sinister.Luckily, guardian angel Augusta Goodnight shows up to calm Lucy's nerves (with a basket of strawberry muffins, of course). And not a moment too soon, because Shirley/Florence is found dead at the bottom of a steep flight of steps in the parking lot behind the Methodist church.She is not the last victim, and Ellis, whose inheritance could be threatened by the reappearance of her long-lost cousin, remains the number-one suspect. Augusta, Lucy, and the Thursday Morning Literary Society (which now meets on Monday afternoons) must use their heads---and a little bit of home cooking---to solve the mystery.

One of America's most beloved mystery writers, Carolyn G. Hart, the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award-winning author, returns to her original mystery series that features Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand Bookstore, and her husband, Max, with Mint Julep Murder. Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to Head Island, where this year's Dixie Book Festival is being held. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the much-coveted Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full juggling murderous egos. What Annie doesn't count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt. Hazlitt arrives at the Festival peddling a proposal for Song of the South, a trashy roman clef that details the indiscretions of some famous Southern authors at a writers' conference--writers who more than resemble the Dixie Festival Medallion winners. When Hazlitt drops dead after drinking a hit of bourbon from his private stock, the evidence points to Annie--the fatal glass is imprinted with her fingerprints. As more and more evidence points her way, Annie and Max must act fast to catch a wily killer...before the police throw the book at Annie!

The show must go on . . . When mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance is invited to stage a Mystery Night for the annual antebellum house tour of the Historical Preservation Society of Chastain, South Carolina, she instead finds herself the leading lady in a flesh-and-blood drama. The play's the thing wherein the curtain falls on mean-spirited grande dame Corinne Webster. While jeweled fingers point, accusing Annie of murder, the perpetrator lurks within the genteel cast of Murder-Most-Make-Believe . . . and the murder weapon is one of the props. In the tight-laced society of Chastain, Annie is guilty until proven innocent. With her fiance, Max Darling, Annie pieces together evidence to clear her name—until her chief witness is murdered. Now it will take all her sleuthing skills to discover the evil in the heart of Chastain's Beautiful People.

Annie Darling, the upbeat owner of a mystery bookstore on Broward's Rock, has a knack for solving puzzles. She receives support from her husband, Max, who operates a unique business assisting those in distress. Together, they navigate the challenges of their island community while unraveling mysteries that come their way.

This librarian and her reading group solve mysteries by the book.Megan Clark must unravel the mystery behind a burial site in the Palo Duro Canyon containing two corpses--one a human skeleton, the other a mummy in Comanche garb--murdered more than 100 years apart.