Showing results by author "Connie Shelton" in All Categories

Charlie's brother, Ron, is ready for the happiest day of his life when he will marry longtime girlfriend Victoria Morgan. Charlie will be matron of honor, her husband Drake the best man. But when Charlie stops by the bride's house to pick her up for the ceremony, the place is in disarray, and Victoria is missing. And Ron has no proof of where he was the night before, after he and his fiancée had a terrible argument. Was the fight nothing more than pre-wedding jitters, as Ron claims? Or did the unthinkable happen?

When Emily Plankhurst is visited by the ghost of Gabriel Graystone, and learns he was murdered, she knows she must find justice for him. The only problem is, Gabriel was killed a hundred years ago, shortly after he broke off his engagement to the daughter of a prominent Taos family, and there aren’t many other clues to go by in finding his killer.

Now that Samantha Sweet has a contract to provide her special handmade chocolates for the wealthy jet-set clients of Book It Travel, Sweet’s Sweets bakery is taking on a whole new dimension. It’s almost Halloween, and her pastry shop is bursting at the seams. She needs extra employees, but there is no place to put them. Right before the witching day, she comes upon a large Victorian house she can adapt for the business, but the mysterious, spooky noises at night are way more than the normal creaks and groans of an old building. Something else is going on.

Charlie receives an assignment to drive a teen runaway girl back to her home in Arizona. It’s about a six hour drive each way, and all she has to do is deliver the girl back to her mother, enjoy a night in a nice hotel, turn around and drive back. She’ll be home in plenty of time to bake the Thanksgiving pies with Elsa and settle into the holiday season back in Albuquerque. Or not.

Charlie is alone in the office when a teen girl comes in, wanting to hire RJP Investigations to find her mom, who vanished without a trace years ago. The clues were sparse at the time, and the old police file doesn't have much that can help Charlie with the search. The problem for young Cassie is that the grandmother who has raised her is now dying and Cassie's life is about to be upended. All that's holding her together is the belief that her mom is out there somewhere.

For John Carver, a simple Celtic woodworker, life is a struggle to feed his family. Then one summer day, as he walks past a near-dead alder tree, lightning strikes. With the shattered tree lying all around him, Carver pulls himself up and decides to make the best of it - he takes the usable pieces to his workshop. From the shards of that dead tree John creates three boxes. Then the unexplained happens - shortly after handling one of them, John's touch brings his young son back from the brink of death.

Charlie is invited to a plush Santa Fe spa, a week-long spiritual/nutrition retreat with her friend Dr. Linda Casper. The massages and spa treatments sound great, until she realizes that there is something darker going on at the mountain resort. Meanwhile, Drake has his own set of concerns. He's been asked to testify as an expert witness in a helicopter crash case and it's causing him more anxiety than any feat of flying ever did. It seems that they are each on their own but their two cases overlap and dangers abound, from all sides.

Samantha Sweet learns that an Irish great-uncle left her an inheritance, so she and Beau change their honeymoon plans and go to the Emerald Isle. Will the gift be something lavish and wonderful? Or is there no pot of gold waiting for Sam? Meanwhile, before Sam fully has the answers to her questions, a new mystery presents itself when a local charter boat is found adrift near the rocky Irish coast, its occupants missing. The family of the captain wants answers and when it looks like a group of Americans might be implicated, the Galway homicide detective in charge of the case enlists Beau’s help.

The weather turns to spring, and Charlie faces a pair of puzzles. Against Charlie’s better judgment Ron, her PI partner, takes a cheating-spouse case that turns into a comedy of errors involving a star football player and his wife’s petty vengeance. Meanwhile, Charlie’s neighbor Elsa has a bad feeling about a family up the street. Is it a case of the neighborhood busybody having too much time on her hands, or is there truly something sinister happening with twin teen girls who’ve been left with too much money and not enough supervision?

It's Halloween, one of the busiest seasons of the year for Samantha Sweet and the crew at her pastry shop, Sweet's Sweets. After baking a zillion pumpkin cookies, ghostly cupcakes, and an all-black cake for a young witch's wedding, the gang is looking forward to a gala costume party at the neighborhood bookshop. But when one of the guests is murdered and a rare book vanishes—practically in front of their eyes—the evening takes a whole different turn and Sam finds herself in the midst of another mystery.

A cryptic message in a fortune cookie sends Charlie again to England to visit her favorite aunt. She's having lunch in a local café when construction workers come upon a human skeleton behind a wall. The police are called to a more urgent case, so Charlie begins sleuthing around on a cold-case crime website, only to discover Aunt Louisa was one of those questioned when the victim disappeared. Can she save her aunt from arrest, or will the real killer come after them both?

It's Christmas in Albuquerque; Charlie and family are ready for a quiet holiday at home. But right away, her hopes fade when Charlie's brother and PI business partner, Ron, brings in two new cases, one of which made national headlines. Five years earlier, with the tide of media attention and public sentiment against her, Tali Donovan was acquitted of killing her two children and went into hiding. Now, on the anniversary of the children's disappearance, their father wants answers.

Samantha Sweet breaks into houses for a living - all perfectly legal as a caretaker for the USDA. But her real dream is to open her own pastry shop, 'Sweet's Sweets.' Life is a little crazy for Sam right now. At one of her break-in properties, a dying woman insists that she take a small wooden box. Sam doesn't realize that the old woman was known locally as a 'bruja,' a witch, until she begins to feel some strange effects from the box.

It’s a terrible case of mistaken identity when a gang of bank robbers think that Charlie is a famous movie star. Disappointed with their take from the bank, they decide that a hefty ransom will be their ticket to riches. But what will happen when the real star steps forward? Charlie knows that only her wits will save her from this band of desperate men. Meanwhile, in a race against the clock, Charlie's husband Drake is working with the FBI and local authorities to get Charlie back before her captors realize their mistake.

Charlie Parker and her husband Drake Langston accept a job with Gold Trail Adventures in Skagway, Alaska, flying visitors by helicopter to remote cabin sites to experience the outdoor lifestyle and seek their fortunes. It isn't long before one of the guests finds a set of bones in an old mine, remains that date back decades.

Two things are weighing on Samantha Sweet's mind this summer - organizing the Sweet Somethings chocolate festival and tracking down information on the mystical carved wooden box that came into her life nearly two years ago, changing her forever. At last she believes she has located the person who can give the answers.

Revenge is often a cold dish, but in the tiny northern New Mexico town of Sembramos emotions are running decidedly hot. When two men convicted of murdering a local girl are released from prison after serving only a few years, their convictions overturned, the town's old pain rises to the surface and tempers flare. Samantha Sweet has her hands full with Easter at Sweet's Sweets, while her husband, Taos County Sheriff Beau Cardwell, is charged with keeping order among the two hundred residents of Sembramos.

When a woman walks into Samantha Sweet’s pastry shop, claiming to have amnesia, it’s a puzzle that seems to have nothing to do with Sam’s new commission for a fantastic one-of-a-kind order of chocolates, although "Jane Doe" seems to know a lot about that. Sam calls Sheriff Beau to solve the mystery of who this stranger is and where she belongs. But Beau’s attention is occupied by other things: nearly his entire force is out sick with some kind of flu bug, and now a murder far from Taos requires his full attention. “Jane’s” forgotten memories become vitally important....

It's Christmas and a chocolatier shows up at Sweet's Sweets, offering to create a special line of hand-dipped chocolates for Sam's customers. He says he will work for no pay, just to prove himself. But she learns that he has connections to the wooden box that seems to give Sam her mystical powers, and discovers that certain evil people will do just about anything to take it away from her.

Charlie's last case left her tired and emotionally drained, so her office staff convinces her to vacation in Kauai. Charlie is riding in a helicopter when she and the pilot spot a dead body lying on the rugged rocks of Kauai's NaPali coast. Mack Garvey, the owner of the helicopter tour company, is accused of the murder. Charlie wants to avoid the whole mess but is persuaded to help Garvey prove his innocence. As the tension builds, Charlie roots out the suspects one by one never dreaming that her own life is about to be snuffed out by sinister means.