The Hidden Staircase Mystery Books recently updated its list of March 2013 hardcover mysteries as well as shelved new March paperbacks on The Mystery Bookshelf.
In this series of monthly posts, which we call Firsts on the 1st, we're introducing readers to new series characters who will make their mysterious American debut in print during March.
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Title: The Christie Curse
Author: Victoria Abbott
Series Character: Jordan Kelly, Book Collector
Formats: Mass Market Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Jordan Kelly is a book collector and literary investigator in Harrison Falls, New York.
Her first case: In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared — making headlines across the world — only to show up eleven days later at a spa under an assumed name. During those eleven days, did she have time to write a play?
Jordan Kelly needs a new job and a new place to live. She's back in Harrison Falls, New York, living with her not so law-abiding uncles, in debt thanks to a credit card — stealing ex and pending grad school loans.
Enter the perfect job, a research position that includes room and board, which will allow her to spend her days hunting down rare mysteries for an avid book collector. There's just one problem: her employer, Vera Van Alst — the most hated citizen of Harrison Falls.
Jordan's first assignment is to track down a rumored Agatha Christie play. It seems easy enough, but Jordan soon finds out that her predecessor was killed while looking for it, and there is still someone out there willing to murder to keep the play out of Vera's hands. Jordan's new job is good … but is it worth her life?
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Title: Tainted Mountain
Author: Shannon Baker
Series Character: Nora Abbott
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Nora Abbott owns a ski resort in northern Arizona.
Her first case: All Nora Abbott wants to do is make enough snow to save her ski resort from the drought that is ravishing Northern Arizona. But now her husband has been murdered; angry protestors have occupied her mountain; her overbearing mother has blown into town; and energy tycoon Barrett McCreary has launched what might just be a hostile takeover of the cashstrapped resort.
To make matters worse, the local Hopi tribe claims making snow on the mountain will upset the balance of the earth, so Nora turns to the ruggedly handsome Cole Huntsman for help. The only trouble is that Huntsman seems to be playing from both sides of the deck. And when a fortune in uranium claims are at stake, double-dealing is a deadly strategy.
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Title: Paging the Dead
Author: Brynn Bonner
Series Character: Sophreena McClure, Family History
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Sophreena McClure is a genealogist.
Her first case: Sophreena McClure is an expert at unearthing other people's secrets. Using old documents and photographs, Soph and her business partner, Esme Sabatier — also a gifted medium — trace family histories and create heritage scrapbooks.
Their latest client, Dorothy Pritchett Porter, is thrilled with their research into Morningside's most prestigious clan. But before Dorothy can proudly display her new scrapbooks on Founders' Day, she's found murdered. It seems the ties that bind can also strangle, for Dorothy has been killed using the Pritchett family pearls.
Pegged as prime suspects, Sophreena and Esme turn their investigative skills from the dearly departed to the alive and dangerous, hoping to pin down the real killer among Dorothy's kinfolk. Sophreena's scrapbooking club members, crafty in more ways than one, pitch in to help. As the Pritchett ancestral roots turn out to be more tangled than anyone suspected, Sophreena wonders just how many skeletons lurk in this family closet — and whether she and Esme are destined to join them.
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Title: Murder by Chance
Author: Pat Dennis
Series Character: Betty Chance
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Betty Chance is the owner of Take A Chance Tours, a Chicago-based company specializing in gaming destinations.
Her first case: Can three scrappy, single women of varied ages find happiness in a new travel business specializing in casino junkets? All bets off when Betty Chance finds a body in a tour bus that arrives at the casino hotel.
At fifty, Betty is unemployed, divorced and penniless, but with her stunningly beautiful niece Lori, she opens Take A Chance Tours, a Chicago-based company specializing in gaming destinations. Betty quickly becomes close friends with Tillie, the perky, effervescent bus driver who happens to be an ex-con.
As soon as the tour bus arrives at Moose Lake Bay Resort and Casino in northern Minnesota, Betty and her driver Tillie, discover a dead body in the locked bathroom of their motor coach. The 350-pound corpse is riddled with stab wounds. With Tillie and Lori's help, Betty puts her amateur sleuth ability to work and searches for the killer.
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Title: What's a Witch to Do?
Author: Jennifer Harlow
Series Character: Mona McGregor, Midnight Magic
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Mona McGregor runs the Midnight Magic shop in Goodnight, Virginia, and is the High Priestess of a large coven.
Her first case: High Priestess might sound like an '80s hair band, but its Mona McGregor's life. She runs the Midnight Magic shop in Goodnight, Virginia, and leads a large coven. She's also raising two nieces and hasn't been with a man for fifteen years … until a handsome doctor takes an interest in her. But Mona's life really heats up when Adam Blue, a sexy werewolf, arrives at her door. Adam informs her that someone wants her dead and he is there to protect her. Hell's bells! When a demon begins stalking her, Mona has to suspect her coven members, and even her family.
With two handsome men and a determined demon after her, Mona teams up with Adam to find out who really wants her dead … and who really wants her.
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Title: Bolero
Author: Joanie McDonell
Series Character: Nick Saylor
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Nick Sayler is a private investigator in New York City.
His first case: Despite his bronze star with its prized V for valor, Nick Sayler was once a thief, junkie, and prime suspect in a murder case. Now he's a mostly changed man, a private investigator with a long list of rich clients and a good life. But even after ten years there's not enough whiskey in the world to wash away acid-etched memories of Julia Carteret, the beautiful woman who took a bullet meant for him.
He never expected a second chance to make things right until he got a midnight call from a distraught young doctor and a plea from a fragile dancer with no money, no memory, nothing in her pocket except Sayler's card, and the number 44 carved across her back. With bewitching violet eyes she looks so much like Julia, Sayler thinks keeping her safe could put him back on the road to redemption. But not long after he takes her home to his Hudson River barge, he learns that she has a past as dark as his own, and soon he's protecting her from a patient sociopath with seemingly preternatural power to be in two places at once.
Sayler needs his wingman Meriwether, the brilliant savant, and his restless backup, Tommy Fallon NYPD homicide, whose dicey investigative methods keep them under the radar, which is the only place to be when Sayler taunts danger. As he nears old secrets linking the dancer to a strange group: a voluptuous redhead, a concert pianist, a skateboarder, and a Polish nanny, he starts to learn why the murderer's sex-stoked obsession can't end until the girl is dead. When the killer who never sleeps gets the best of an exhausted Sayler on an isolated island off the coast of Connecticut, in Manhattan's meatpacking district, and on the streets of Harlem, smart money might bet both ways, except for one sure thing: in spite of his bad leg and worse habits, no matter what the cost, Nick Sayler will not let another woman die.
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Title: The Missing File
Author: D. A. Mishani
Series Character: Avraham Avraham
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Avraham Avraham is a police inspector in Tel Aviv (Israel).
His first case: Sixteen year old Ofer, who left his home in Holon one morning on his way to school, disappeared without leaving a trace. Police inspector Avraham Avraham, guilt-ridden and determined to find the missing boy, is gradually consumed by the frustrating investigation that takes over his life.
It seems that the more he finds out about the boy and his life, the further he gets from the truth. And only one man, Ofer's older neighbor and private teacher Ze'ev Avni, has something to tell him. But will the neighbor's strange story save the investigation before it's too late?
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Title: Show Me the Murder
Author: Carolyn Mulford
Series Character: Phoenix Smith and Annalynn Carr Keyser, Show Me
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the characters: Former CIA covert operative Phoenix Smith and her best friend and acting sheriff Annalynn Carr Keyser solve crimes in their rural Missouri hometown.
Their first case: After a bullet shatters Phoenix Smith's career as a CIA covert operative, she returns to her rural Missouri hometown to recuperate and regroup. She arrives as her lifelong friend, civic leader Annalynn Carr Keyser, buries her husband, the sheriff. Everyone except the widow believes he shot his mistress and himself. Annalynn begs Phoenix to help prove he, too, was murdered.
The old friends employ their diverse skills and conflicting attitudes to discover what really happened and to survive.
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Title: Marbeck and the Double-Dealer
Author: John Pilkington
Series Character: Martin Barbeck
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Martin Marbeck is an intelligencer in Elizabethan England.
His first case: 1600: A new century dawns. War with Spain has dragged on for fifteen years, the conflict in Ireland for six. Unease stalks England in the dying years of Elizabeth I's reign, and Elizabethan intelligencer Martin Marbeck is bored.
Then a message from his spymaster, Sir Robert Cecil arrives: the existence of a spy has been discovered, code-named Morera, and Marbeck must uncover the true identity of this traitor quickly, before rumours of the young King Philip III forming a new Armada prove themselves to be true.
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Title: Some Enchanted Murder
Author: Linda S. Reilly
Series Character: Apple Mariani
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Apple Mariani is a paralegal and title searcher in Hazleton, New Hampshire.
Her first case: Apple Mariani is accustomed to solving mysteries — mysteries such as missing heirs, lingering liens, and gaps in a chain of title. But when appraiser Lou Marshall is stabbed with an antique dagger at an estate sale, Apple finds herself plunged into the heart of a murder. For starters, she learns that the victim had entrusted her with a decades-old valentine only minutes before he was killed. Then things take a nasty turn when Apple's Aunt Tressa — the victim's new squeeze — is pegged as a prime suspect, and their elderly friend Lillian goes suddenly missing. Was Lillian kidnapped, or worse, because she witnessed the murder? And why had Lou been so anxious to get that faded old valentine, with its sugary poem, into Apple's custody?
Despite the local police chief's annoying lack of concern, Apple is sure Lillian is in trouble when a cryptic call from Lillian's cell phone awakens her late at night. Still haunted by childhood memories of her own mother vanishing, Apple knows she has to find her friend before it's too late. From the shelves of a local antique shop to the culinary horrors of the grungiest diner in New Hampshire, Apple and Tressa collect a series of clues that lead them in maddening circles … all the way to a frustrating dead end. But time is running out, because a desperate killer, whose patience is wearing thin, still has a deadly agenda …
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Title: A Nose for Death
Author: Glynis Whiting
Series Character: Joan Parker
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Joan "Nosey" Parker is an amateur sleuth.
Her first case: Chemist Dr. Joan Parker has the ability to name more scents that just about any other person on the planet. She can distinguish cane sugar from beet sugar, burning pine from spruce, and a man on the make from a man on the take. Combining scents to create food flavors is her occupation and her passion. Her understanding of the effects of all of the senses on human emotion and behavior is her pass key.
At fifty, Joan is at a transitional time of life. She's outspoken, sometimes to a fault, and, through her words, private thoughts and actions, provides the reader with candid insights into her romantic, sexual and emotional life. Joan is at first confused when she receives a reunion invitation to Madden High, the school from which she never graduated. After the death of her father, the family moved away. Her estranged husband, Mort, convinces her to attend. This is the first time that she's been back to the town of Madden in thirty years.
Her worst fear is realized when her name isn't on the invitation list when she arrives then she becomes the prime suspect in the murder of Roger Rimmer, the Mick Jagger of her high school class.
The upside of her return to Madden is Gabe. Her geeky best friend is now the handsome, compassionate Sgt. Theissen, head of the district RCMP detachment. Their passionate attraction leads to an illicit affair.
After Peg Chalmers, the only person who can explain why she was invited to the reunion, is found dead, Joan turns her research skills to the investigation. An intricate examination of Madden reveals buried secrets and makes Joan confront her own ghosts. Along the way she gains a new respect for her own mother.
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Title: A Matter of Trust
Author: Lis Wiehl and April Henry
Series Character: Mia Quinn
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Mia Quinn is an investigator with the Seattle District Attorney's office.
Her first case: One minute Mia Quinn is in her basement, chatting on the phone with a colleague at the prosecutor's office. The next minute there's a gunshot over the line, and Mia listens in horror as her colleague and friend Colleen bleeds to death.
Mia's a natural for heading up the murder investigation, but these days she has all she can do to hold her life together. As a new widow with a pile of debts, a troubled teenaged son, and a four-year-old who wakes up screaming at night, she needs more time with her family, not less — and working Colleen's case will be especially demanding. But Colleen was her friend, and she needs to keep her job. So she reluctantly teams up with detective Charlie Carlson to investigate Colleen's death. But the deeper they dig, the more complications unfold — even the unsettling possibility that someone may be coming after her.
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Title: Capital Punishment
Author: Robert Wilson
Series Character: Charles Boxer
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Charles Boxer, ex-army, ex-police, is a private security specialist in kidnap and recovery in Mumbai (India).
His first case: Alyshia D'Cruz, daughter of Indian tycoon Frank D'Cruz, has grown up in London and Mumbai wanting for nothing. After a boozy evening out, she gets in the wrong cab home.
Enter Charles Boxer. Ex-army, ex-police, he has found his niche in private security. His specialty: kidnap and recovery. When D'Cruz hires Boxer to find Alyshia, Boxer knows Frank's crooked business empire has made him plenty of enemies. Despite the vast D'Cruz fortune, the kidnappers don't want cash, instead favoring a cruel and lethal game. But the British government doesn't want its big new investor to lose his daughter in the heart of the capital. The MI6 office in India follows Boxer's lead, and soon it seems more lives than Alyshia's are at stake as the trail crosses paths with a terrorist plot on British soil.
To save Alyshia, Boxer must dodge religious fanatics, Indian mobsters, and London's homegrown crime lords. Capital Punishment is a thrilling journey to the dark side of people and places that lie just out of view, waiting for the moment to tear a life apart.
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For a list of more hardcover mysteries scheduled for publication during March, please visit our New Mysteries home page. If you're interested in new paperbacks, visit The Mystery Bookshelf, where you can discover a library of new mysteries, also updated with March 2013 releases. See also our regularly updated eBook site for new mysteries, suspense novels and thrillers, MysterEbooks.com.
Please also visit the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books where we are committed to providing readers and collectors of mystery books with the best and most current information about their favorite authors, titles, and series.
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