Showing results by author "Elaine Viets" in All Categories

Helen Hawthorne is still on the run because of her refusal to pay her worthless ex-husband alimony. But a girl’s gotta eat...and pay rent, utilities, etc. So she’s taken a cash-paying job at Fort Lauderdale’s own Page Turners bookstore. And while the job is decent enough, the owner of the store is anything but. Page Turner III is a boor with more money than brains: He’s cheating on his wife while running his family business into the ground and has a list of enemies longer than any best seller. So when he turns up dead, no one is too surprised. What is surprising is where.

"Ageless" Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show, she humiliates three homeless women onstage, fires her entourage - not for the first time - and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch. After she collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA.

The last thing Chouteau County death investigator Angela Richman wants to do during the holidays is her job. So it’s with some trepidation that she agrees to help the desperate Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche when they show up on her doorstep. Their daughter Juliet is missing. She was last seen leaving a high-school party just before midnight, and they’d like Angela’s help getting their trusted local detectives involved. The officer assigned to the case - Chouteau newcomer Det. Jace Budewitz - is far too blunt and impolite for their liking.

Helen and Phil discover dark undercurrents of corruption behind the facades of cute beachfront businesses, as well domestic secrets. Helen and Phil have to solve this crime soon—before they’re all up a creek without a paddle.

Helen Hawthorne and her new husband, Phil Sagemont, are a PI team. To catch a jewel thief on a luxury yacht, Helen goes undercover as the ship’s new stewardess, serving drinks to snobs, scrubbing floors, and cleaning up after seasick passengers. While Helen is cruising the Bahamas, Phil has to catch a sexy gold digger who may have killed her elderly husband for his fortune.

Husband and wife PI team Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont are hired by Trish Barrymore, who is divorcing her no-account accountant Mort. When Mort is found dead, Trish is the main suspect. She wants Helen and Phil to find out who killed Mort Barrymore—and more importantly, kidnapped Justine, the couple’s pedigreed Chartreux show cat. Helen goes undercover as an assistant to a woman who shows prizewinning Persians. Under the primping, posing, and purring, cat shows are a high-pressure world, and now the stakes are life and death.