The Hidden Staircase Mystery Books recently updated its list of September 2012 hardcover mysteries as well as shelved new September 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 September.
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Title: A Spoonful of Murder
Author: Connie Archer
Series Character: Lucky Jamieson, Soup Lovers
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Lucky Jamieson is the owner of By the Spoonful, a soup shop in small town Vermont.
Her first case: When Lucky inherits her parents' soup shop she realizes it's time to take stock of her life. Should she sell her parents' house or move in herself? Does she really want to run a restaurant business? And what about her grandfather Jack, who seems to be showing signs of Alzheimer's?
But her life decisions are moved to the back burner after an icy blonde tourist is found frozen to death behind the soup shop. and Lucky is bowled over when her soup chef, Sage DuBois, is led out of the kitchen by the police. As suspicion and speculations snowball, Lucky decides that the only way to save her employee and her business is to find out herself who iced the tourist--and landed her chef in the soup …
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Title: Talking to the Dead
Author: Harry Bingham
Series Character: Fiona Griffiths
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Fiona Griffiths is a Detective Constable with the South Wales Police.
Her first case: At first, the murder scene appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her. But then detectives find a strange piece of evidence in the squalid house: the platinum credit card of a very wealthy — and long dead — steel tycoon. What is a heroin-addicted hooker doing with the credit card of a well-known and powerful man who died months ago? This is the question that the most junior member of the investigative team, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, is assigned to answer.
But D.C. Griffiths is no ordinary cop. She's earned a reputation at police headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, for being odd, for not picking up on social cues, for being a little overintense. And there's that gap in her past, the two-year hiatus that everyone assumes was a breakdown. But Fiona is a crack investigator, quick and intuitive. She is immediately drawn to the crime scene, and to the tragic face of the six-year-old girl, who she is certain has something to tell her … something that will break the case wide open.
Ignoring orders and protocol, Fiona begins to explore far beyond the rich man's credit card and into the secrets of her seaside city. And when she uncovers another dead prostitute, Fiona knows that she's only begun to scratch the surface of a dark world of crime and murder. But the deeper she digs, the more danger she risks—not just from criminals and killers but from her own past … and the abyss that threatens to pull her back at any time.
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Title: The Goddaughter
Author: Melodie Campbell
Series Character: Gina Gallo
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Gina Gallo is a gemologist in Hamilton (Ontario).
Her first case: Gina Gallo would like nothing better than to run her little jewelry shop. Unfortunately she's also "the Goddaughter", and, as she tells her new friend Pete, "you don't get to choose your relatives." And you can't avoid them when you live in Hamilton and they more or less run the place.
When Gina bumps into Pete at the Art Gallery Gala, sparks fly. So do bullets, when her cousin Tony is taken down by rival mobsters from New York. It turns out Tony was carrying a load of hot gems in the heel of his shoe. When Gina is reluctantly recruited to carry the rocks back to Buffalo, the worst happens: they get stolen. Pete and Gina have no choice but to steal them back, even though philandering politicians, shoe fetishists, and a trio of inept goons stand in their way.
It's all in a day's work, when you're the Goddaughter.
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Title: The Calling
Author: Neil Cross
Series Character: John Luther
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: John Luther is a Detective Chief Inspector in London. The character was originally created for the television series Luther.
His first case: DCI John Luther is a murder detective with an extraordinary case-clearance rate. He's obsessive, instinctive, and intense. Nobody who ever stood at his side has a bad word to say about him. And yet there are rumors that Luther is bad — not corrupt, not on the take, but tormented. After years of chasing the most depraved criminals in London's gritty underworld, he seethes with a hidden fury that at times he can barely control. Sometimes it sends him to the brink of madness, making him do things any other detective wouldn't and shouldn't do.
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Title: Serenade to a Cuckoo
Author: Flo Fitzpatrick
Series Character: P. L. McGinnis
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: P. L. (Princess Louise) McGinnis is an actress, who plays a detective on television.
Her first case: Portraying Detective Jocelyn Girard on television forensic drama Crime Unit New Jersey involves dealing with special-effects corpses, high speed chases, and flamboyant gymnastic feats for actress P. L. McGinnis.
But when P. L. begins stumbling over "real live dead bodies" she's thrust into a mystery which mirrors C.U.N.J. episodes, including a pursuit-on-horseback-by-a-clown scene in the middle of a New Jersey Thanksgiving Parade. If P. L. can't produce the antique clock which holds the key to the murders, her final scene might be filmed at her own funeral.
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Title: Foul Play at the Fair
Author: Shelley Freydont
Series Character: Liv Montgomery, Celebration Bay
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Liv Montgomery is an event planner in Celebration Bay, New York.
Her first case: As more and more tourists flock to Celebration Bay to enjoy their seasonal festivals, the town is in need of a professional coordinator. Enter Manhattan event planner Liv Montgomery, tired of big-city stress and looking for an idyllic spot where she and her Westie terrier, Whiskey, can put down roots. The Harvest by the Bay Festival is Liv's first chance to prove herself, and everything from apple bobbing to pumpkin painting goes perfectly — until the body of an itinerant juggler is discovered stuffed into an antique apple press.
With a murderer on the loose, town leaders threaten to shut down the upcoming Halloween and Christmas festivals. But the town's livelihood is at stake, and there is no way Liv is going to let that happen, even if she has to solve the murder herself. No matter how many balls she needs to keep in the air, Liv is determined to find a killer who's rotten to the core …
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Title: Angel with a Bullet
Author: M. C. Grant
Series Character: Dixie Flynn
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Dixie Flynn is a reporter in San Francisco.
Her first case: Wisecracking Dixie thinks fast and talks even faster — it's the only way to survive the San Francisco crime beat. When she's assigned to look into the death of her former lover, artist Diego Chino, Dixie's instincts tell her there's more behind the apparent suicide than the police are letting on.
Dixie's canvassing of the Bay Area art district reveals it to be a perfect picture of corruption, with a handsome art dealer and a reclusive patron in the foreground. After a romantic evening in Chinatown ends in a brush with death, Dixie is more determined than ever to expose the truth. But when a fire in her vicinity turns out to be more than just performance art, it's clear the perpetrators would rather see Dixie dead than let her destroy their criminal masterpiece.
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Title: In a Fix
Author: Linda Grimes
Series Character: Ciel Halligan
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Ciel Halligan is an "aura adapter", a human chameleon able to take on her clients' appearances and slip seamlessly into their lives.
Her first case: Snagging a marriage proposal for her client while on an all-expenses-paid vacation should be a simple job for Ciel, aura adaptor extraordinaire. A kind of human chameleon, she's able to take on her clients' appearances and slip seamlessly into their lives, solving any sticky problems they don't want to deal with themselves. No fuss, no muss. Big paycheck. This particular assignment is pretty enjoyable … that is, until Ciel's island resort bungalow is blown to smithereens and her client's about-to-be-fiance is snatched by modern-day Vikings.
For some reason, Ciel begins to suspect that getting the ring is going to be a tad more difficult than originally anticipated. Going from romance to rescue requires some serious gear-shifting, as well as a little backup. Her best friend, Billy, and Mark, the CIA agent she's been crushing on for years — both skilled adaptors — step in to help, but their priority is, annoyingly, keeping her safe.
Before long, Ciel is dedicating more energy to escaping their watchful eyes than she is to saving her client's intended. Suddenly, facing down a horde of Vikings feels like the least of her problems.
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Title: Red Jacket
Author: Joseph Heywood
Series Character: Lute Bapcat
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Lute Bapcat is one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state's industrial center.
His first case: Lute Bapcat … orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation — all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature's bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strike's violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party.
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Title: The Code
Author: G. B. Joyce
Series Character: Brad Shade
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Brad Shade is a hockey scout turned private investigator.
His first case: Brad Shade has been just about everywhere hockey is played. He has ridden the buses in the minors, shared dressing rooms with the legends of the game, closed bars with guys destined for the Hall of Fame, and dropped the gloves with journeymen like himself who'll never get near it. Now that he's retired after fourteen years of bouncing around the league, he's living out of a suitcase and scouting for Los Angeles, where someone in management owes him a favor from his playing days.
But when the brutally murdered body of coaching legend Red Hanratty turns up in the parking lot after an old-timers charity game, Shade's job of scouting the local phenomenon starts to overlap with investigating the killing of the kid's grizzled old coach.
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Title: Death in Breslau
Author: Marek Krajewski
Series Character: Eberhard Mock
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Eberhard Mock is a police officer in 1940s Breslau, later Wroclaw (Poland). The character first appeared in print in 1999 in Smierc w Breslau; this is the first book of the series to be translated into English.
His first case: Occupied Breslau, 1933: Two young women are found murdered on a train, scorpions writhing on their bodies, an indecipherable note in an apparently oriental language nearby … Police Inspector Eberhard Mock's weekly assignation with two ladies of the night is interrupted as he is called to investigate.
But uncovering the truth is no straightforward matter in Breslau. The city is in the grip of the Gestapo, and has become a place where spies are everywhere, corrupt ministers torture confessions from Jewish merchants, and Freemasons guard their secrets with blackmail and violence.
And as Mock and his young assistant Herbert Anwaldt plunge into the city's squalid underbelly the case takes on a dark twist of the occult when the mysterious note seems to indicate a ritual killing with roots in the Crusades …
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Title: The Slickrock Paradox
Author: Stephen Legault
Series Character: Silas Pearson, Red Rock Canyon
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Silas Pearson is an anti-hero in this series of Red Rock Canyon mysteries.
His first case: Silas is looking for answers. It's been more than three years since his wife, Penelope de Silva, disappeared while working on a conservation project in Utah's red rock wilderness. Law enforcement authorities have given up hope of finding the adventurous Penelope alive. And some suggest that she may not have vanished into the desert at all but simply left Silas for another man. Silas moves to Moab, where his wife was last seen, with one purpose: finding his wife, dead or alive. His search takes him into a spectacular wilderness of red rock canyons, soaring mesas, and vertical earth, where he must confront his failures as a husband and his guilt for not being there when Penelope needed him most.
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Title: A Lack of Temperance
Author: Anna Loan-Wilsey
Series Character: Hattie Davish
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Hattie Davish is a traveling secretary in this historical series.
Her first case: Have typewriter will travel … and track down dead bodies. Not the usual motto for a Victorian private secretary and certainly not what Miss Hattie Davish has in mind when she responds to the latest summons for her services.
On the eve of the 1892 Election, Hattie arrives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a booming health spa and vacation resort, hoping to hike the hills, botanize and placate the demands of her newest high-society employer. Yet her employer is missing, and this idyllic Ozark village is being plagued by a league of temperance women attacking saloons with hatchets and bricks, a city council candidate fighting in the streets and a trail of cryptic death threats. With her reputation and life on the line, Hattie will put more than her trusty typewriter to the test.
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Title: Murder Unmentionable
Author: Meg London
Series Character: Emma Taylor, Sweet Nothings
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Emma Taylor works in her aunt's lingerie boutique store, Sweet Nothings, in Tennessee.
Her first case: Emma thought she knew what to expect when she abandoned life as a big-city fashionista to help her aunt, Arabella, breathe new style into Sweet Nothings, her waning lingerie boutique. As Emma settles back in to Paris, Tennessee — a world where pie is served with a parable and a pitcher of sweet tea is the cure for most of life's ills — her escape seems smooth as silk.
But when the town acquires a touch of unneeded je ne sais quoi with the arrival of Emma's philandering ex, an unseemly murder turns her world inside out. As the police's top suspect, Emma is going to need more than fishnets to snare the real killer. And when she and Arabella refuse to let death threats wrapped in knifed nighties stall Sweet Nothings' vintage lingerie fashion show, it becomes increasingly clear that any garter may hide a gun and that bullet bras might have to live up to their name …
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Title: Last Wool and Testament
Author: Molly MacRae
Series Character: Kath Rutledge, Haunted Yarn Shop
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Kath Rutledge owns The Weaver's Cat, a fabric and fiber shop in Tennessee.
Her first case: Kath is about to learn the true meaning of TGIF — Thank Goodness It's Fiber …
That's the name of the spunky group of fiber and needlework artists founded by Ivy McClellan, Kath's beloved grandmother. Though Ivy has recently passed on, the ladies still meet regularly at her fabric and fiber shop, The Weaver's Cat, which Kath has now inherited. But that's only the first in a series of surprises when Kath returns to the small town of Blue Plum, Tennessee, to settle her grandmother's affairs.
There's been a murder, and it turns out her grandmother was the prime suspect. Before she can begin to clear Ivy's name, Kath encounters a looming presence in the form of a gloomy ghost. It turns out the specter has just as much interest in solving the murder as Kath. So, with a little help from the ladies of TGIF — and a stubborn spirit from beyond — she sets out to unravel the clues and hook the real killer.
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Title: Twisted Vines
Author: Carole Price
Series Character: Cait Pepper, Shakespeare in the Vineyard
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Caitlyn Tilson Pepper is a crime analyst, who inherits her aunt's vineyard in California.
Her first case: Cait inherits a vineyard and two Shakespearean theaters in a northern California town from a mysterious aunt and becomes a target for murder. If she accepts this inheritance, she must move to California and give up the job she loves in Ohio. If she refuses the inheritance, the estate will go to a foundation for the arts. Time is of the essence. What will her decision be?
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Title: The Natanz Directive
Author: Wayne Simmons and Mark Graham
Series Character: Jake Conlan
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Jake Conlan is an ex-government operative.
His first case: An unexpected phone call from the Pentagon propels the "superpatriot" back into the deadly world of international espionage and “black ops” he thought he had left behind him.
Jake is asked to mount an emergency, highly dangerous mission inside Iran. His mission: to develop intel that can indisputably prove that Iran has nuclear-launch capabilities and bring down the current Iranian regime.
Traveling from Paris to Amsterdam and then undercover into Iran itself, Jake connects with the Iranian covert opposition only to discover there is a traitor on his team. With a ticking clock counting down, Jake has to risk his mission, and his life, to uncover the traitor, and stop an imminent attack on Israel, for it will be full-scale world war if he fails.
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Title: Gone
Author: Randy Wayne White
Series Character: Hannah Smith
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Hannah Smith is a fishing guide in Florida.
Her first case: Hannah Smith: a tall, strong, formidable Florida woman, the descendant of generations of strong Florida women. She makes her living as a fishing guide, but her friends, neighbors, and clients also know her as an uncommonly resourceful woman with a keen sense of justice — someone who can't be bullied — and they have taken to coming to her with their problems.
Her methods can be unorthodox, though, and those on the receiving end of them often wind up very unhappy — and sometimes very violent. And when a girl goes missing, and Hannah is asked to find her, that is exactly what happens …
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For a list of more hardcover mysteries scheduled for publication during September, 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 September 2012 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.
