Mostrando resultados por autor "Charlotte MacLeod" en Todas las categorías

The rural town of Balaclava greets Groundhog Day as an excuse for one last cold-weather fling. The students and faculty of the local agricultural college drink cocoa, throw snowballs, and when the temperature allows, ice skate. But Oozak's Pond is not quite frozen this year, and as the celebrations reach their peak, the students see someone bobbing through the ice. Long past help, the drowning victim is badly decomposed and dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat with a heavy rock in each pocket. 

Janet Rhys is driving through the backwoods of Canada when she sees the truck ahead of her lose control, smash into a snow bank, and flip sideways, completely blocking the road. Springing to action, she darts into a nearby barn, searching for something to use to rescue the person trapped inside. When she hears an explosion, Janet returns to find the truck is nothing but smoking wreckage, and the driver has stolen her car. 

After Architrave's will reveals that he bequeathed his ramshackle old house to the Grub-and-Stakers, with instructions for it to be turned into a museum, Dittany resigns herself to weeks of cleaning out the mansion and sorting through donated town "artifacts". The task turns interesting, however, the minute bodies start falling from the sky. The new curator is airing out the house's attic when he takes his tumble off the roof.

Like many old New England families, the Kellings live to die. Although their family vault is spacious and comfortable, it will not do for Sarah Kelling's great-uncle Frederick. In his will, he demands to be buried inside the ancient family tomb at Boston Common, which hasn't admitted a new member in more than a century. But when the Kellings crack the old vault's door, they find a recently built brick wall - and behind it lays a surprisingly fresh corpse, a skeleton with rubies in its teeth. 

Sarah Kelling and her husband, Max Bittersohn, have made names for themselves tracking down stolen paintings, sculptures, and, when necessary, the occasional murderer. But this is the first time they have been asked to find a missing Rolls Royce. When Bill Billingsgate's prize 1927 New Phantom disappears, they head for his estate on the Massachusetts coast, arriving - to their horror - just in time for Billingsgate's annual Renaissance fair.  

Though a few years past 60, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma is as vigorous as a girl of 22. She sings, she dances, and when the local fire department needs a fundraising boost, she's happy to jump out a window for charity. This summer, she decamps to Maine, to beat the heat at an island retreat for artists and great thinkers. There are writers, painters, a psychic, and a historian, and their company promises to be great fun - until a few of them go treasure-crazy. 

The weather vanes of the famous craftsman Praxiteles Lumpkin are one of the great cultural treasures of rural Massachusetts. Helen Shandy, librarian at Balaclava Agricultural College, is roaming the countryside, camera in hand, capturing images of these lovely copper sculptures, trying to give them the attention they deserve. But each time she takes a picture, the featured vane vanishes.

Although he towers over his neighbors, Jim Feldster is otherwise unremarkable, except for his mastery of cow milking and his membership in every lodge, rotary club, and brotherhood that Balaclava County has to offer. And anyone who's met his wife, Mirelle, a vicious gossip with a hysterical streak, can understand why he never misses a meeting. But one night their neighbors, the sleuthing academics Peter and Helen Shandy, wake at 2:47 a.m. to the sound of Mirelle screaming. 

Each December, the faculty of Balaclava Agricultural College goes wild with holiday decorations. The entire campus glitters with Christmas lights, save for one dark spot: the home of Professor Peter Shandy. But after years of resisting the school's Illumination festival, Shandy suddenly snaps, installing a million-watt display of flashing lights and blaring music perfectly calculated to drive his neighbors mad. Then the horticulturalist flees town, planning to spend Christmas on a tramp steamer. He returns home to find his lights extinguished - and a dead librarian in his living room.

In a quiet small town in New Brunswick, old Agatha Treadway makes one last cranky complaint to her niece before dying on her kitchen floor. The cause seems to be a jar of contaminated string beans, which sat on Agatha's basement shelf for years before becoming her final meal. The town doctor calls it a tragic accident - and a warning to all who can their own vegetables - but Agatha's neighbor, the intrepid Janet Wadman, knows better. Agatha was an expert canner, which means the beans must have been placed there by someone else. This was murder.

Though he may not look the part, Madoc Rhys is a Mountie - and his keen sense of detection tells him it's time to ask Janet Wadman to marry him. They have just gotten engaged when Christmas rolls around, and Janet's boss invites them to his family estate for a last holiday fling before Janet leaves her job. After a long helicopter ride, they are at Graylings, ancestral home of the Condryckes, a family so strange that Canada's shortest Mountie fits right in. There is a psychic old woman, an erudite butler, and a family patriarch.

Newlyweds Peter and Helen Shandy are picking out flatware when a pair of gun-toting hooligans burst into the silversmith's shop, empty the safe, and leave with Helen as their hostage. Although the police recover Helen quickly, her professor husband is badly shaken by the ordeal. Early the next morning, the college's head of animal husbandry frantically reports another hostage situation in progress. Belinda, the school's beloved sow, has been kidnapped, and only Peter can bring home the bacon.  

The angry old men of the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish club celebrate yuletide doing what they do best: eating, drinking, and greeting the season of giving with a spirited "bah, humbug!" Though well past sixty, Jem Kelling is a relative infant compared to some of the club's elder statesmen, and he has waited decades to host their annual Christmas scowl. And during his first evening as Exalted Chowderhead, he is thrilled to find the wine abundant, the chowder superb, and the humbugs as lusty as ever. 

Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn't. Dittany is giving him what-for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill, and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn't the target.

Producing a Gilbert & Sullivan opera requires a special kind of madness, and the Kelling family is large enough and peculiar enough to undertake an entire company by themselves. For years now, Sarah Kelling's aunt Emma has supervised these annual productions - from The Pirates of Penzance to The Mikado - and this year she has invited her cast of relatives to rehearse The Sorcerer in her stately mansion. The show is nearly ready when a team of burglars drugs the cast and crew to make off with a priceless portrait.  

An unpleasant man in every respect, university Professor Herbert Ungley is exceedingly vain. One morning, his landlady catches her cat coming in with Ungley's hairpiece between its teeth. It's clear something has happened to the old grouch, because he would never be caught without his toupee. Ungley is found in the yard behind his social club, with his head bashed in and his baldness plain for the world to see. Although the police are content to call it an accident, sleuthing horticulturalist Peter Shandy is unconvinced and finds there are too many unanswered questions.  

Zilla Trott is pouring her cat some chamomile tea when the drifter appears in her kitchen. He is grubby and crude - not at all the kind of person you'd usually find in the pleasant town of Lobelia Falls - but something about him intrigues the aging widow. Perhaps it's his rugged good looks, or the way he seems to come from another time and place. Or perhaps it's the fact that he's been dead for nearly a century.

When 105-year-old Hilda Horsefall tells young reporter Cronkite Swope of a stone carved with Norse runes that once sat in the nearby woods, the writer starts salivating at the thought of breaking the news that Vikings once marauded through their sleepy Massachusetts countryside. But while he's jotting down notes, a scream rings out, and Cronkite finds an even bigger story. A farmhand has been burned to death by quicklime, and Cronkite gets an exclusive scoop. 

Emory Emmerick comes to Balaclava Agricultural University as a scout for a television station. Although the faculty and students are hardly ready for prime time, Emmerick's interest is in environmental programming - a subject that inspires even the driest Balaclava professor to wax poetic. In his search for material, Emmerick joins Peter Shandy and a few of his colleagues on the annual owl count.  

When Jenson Thorbisher-Freep announces an amateur theatrical contest, the women in the Grub-and-Stake gardening club race to join in. They enlist Osbert Monk as their playwright - not only is he married to their club leader Dittany Monk, but he's famous the world over as Lex Laramie, best-selling novelist of Westerns. Taking the legend of Dangerous Dan McGrew as his inspiration, Osbert delivers a rough draft faster than the Pony Express. Now all the Grub-and-Stakers have to do is cast it.