Charlotte MacLeod

Professor Jim Feldster will do anything for his cows and his students of dairy management...and anything to avoid an evening at home with his bossy, house-proud wife, Mirelle. A member of every lodge in the county, he's out of the house most evenings, and on this particular night, escaping to a meeting of the Scarlet Runners. On the way, he bumps into a neighbor, Peter Shandy, who is out strolling with his cat, Jane Austen. Professor Feldster never arrives at his meeting. Meanwhile, at precisely 2:47 A.M., a distraught Mirelle arrives at the Shandy household pounding at the front door and accusing the Shandys of harboring her wayward spouse. Before he knows it, Peter and his librarian wife, Helen, are knee-deep in another mystery. Where is Professor Feldster? What dark secrets could possibly be lurking behind his life of grain supplements and electric milking machines? Peter and Helen's good friend, mystery writer Catriona McBogle, is serendipitously plunged into the case, and all three begin to plough through what appears to be a herd of lies. Soon Peter discovers that Jim Feldster, assuming he is not dead already, is in terrible danger. Mirelle faces perils as well - and they're a lot more serious than someone tracking mud on her white carpet.

The life of Mary Roberts Rinehart, for many years America's best-known author, is one of love and violence, overpowering ambition, and immense courage. From witnessing the carnage on the battlefields of France in World War I to surviving a murder attempt in her own house, from the pain-wrecked wards of a Pittsburgh hospital to decades of glittering celebrity, Mrs. Rinehart is here depicted by fellow writer Charlotte MacLeod, a lifelong fan whose empathy and perception bring a complex woman back to life on these pages. Born in 1876 to a farmer's daughter and a sewing machine salesman, Mary Roberts would always be torn between a desire for middle-class respectability and a life of adventure fostered by her irrepressible will and determination. At not quite seventeen, just out of high school, she defied her parents to become a student nurse. Faced with the poignant realities of hospital life, she learned much about human frailty, both physical and moral. Three years later, after a tempestuous forbidden courtship, she married one of the hospital staff, Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart. . Like all young marrieds, the Rineharts had to watch their pennies. While Stanley was off on his evening house calls, Mary took to writing fiction. Gradually, her sales became a growing source of income, first to cover household crises, later to support the opulent lifestyle and reckless spending that even her enormous income could not always cover. In Had She But Known, Mary Roberts Rinehart appears in chiaroscuro tones: the demure doctor's wife and prolific professional author; a no-nonsense campaigner against social ills; and a socialite who dined at the White House in silks and diamonds. Here too are the conflicts that made her 36-year-long marriage a struggle between power and devotion, yet a union so intense that it led the widow to attend seances after her husband's death. A half century of fame and an indefatigable energy for turning out bestselling books that also became a gold mine for the burgeoning moving pictures industry made the author a larger-than-life figure to her vast public. In private life she faced illness, emotional stress, and a strange affinity for danger that led her down untrodden paths. . Charlotte MacLeod's vivid portrait reintroduces to a new generation a woman whose name was for many years a household word. At a time when women are questioning whether it is really possible to "have it all and do it all," here is the story of Mary Roberts Rinehart, born just one hundred years after the birth of our nation, who did it all...and did it with style, panache, and irrepressible zest.

Go-getter Ariel Anderson is back in Bliss, West Virginia. She's got to shoot a TV spot—and undo her (undeserved) wild-child reputation. But there's something downright sexy happening in Bliss. And inexplicably, Ariel aches to be more naughty than nice.Especially after colliding with Rex Houston, the hottest CDC virus-chasing "cowboy" this side of the mountains. He's testing the local spring for a love bug dubbed "Romeo" that's reputed to cause sexual mayhem for seven straight days.For the first time in sixty years, Bliss is going "buggy." Romantic songs on the radio. Restaurant breakfast specials for two. The whole town is under some spell. Now Rex and Ariel are testing some steamy waters of their own. Maybe this myth was never meant to be debugged....

Eighth in the Professor Peter Shandy mystery series The Annual Owl Count is serious business at Balaclava Agricultural College. So why does a team that includes the redoubtable Professor Shandy, Stott and Binks also include a boorish avian ignoramus like Emory Emmerick? And how could Emmerick have had the temerity to get himself netted and stabbed to death while in pursuit of an extremely rare Snowy Owl? It's clear Emmerick was no gentleman. Oddly enough, he also wasn't the site engineer for the new college TV station, despite his claims. So just what was he doing in the down of Lumpkinton—did it have anything to do with Professor Winifred Binks' newly inherited millions? When unknown villains kidnap Professor Binks, Peter Shandy—the Hercule Poirot of the turnip fields—speeds into action. Suddenly, Peter and his confederates are in a runaway tugboat, sweeping down a flood-swollen river and facing the dire consequences of what could be the most hostile takeover in corporate history.

Though a few years past sixty, Sarah Kelling’s Aunt Emma is as vigorous as a girl of twenty-two. 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. Sensible people have long dismissed rumors of the Pocapuk Island treasure as myth, but artists are seldom sensible. When their rampant digging stirs up buried trouble, it leads to theft, drugging, and a murder. And although Sarah and her husband Max give investigative advice by phone, it’s up to Aunt Emma to save the islanders from themselves.

A member of the Senior Citizens' Recycling Center has turned up dead in a part of Boston where he would never have been found alive. Why did he go there? How did he get there? Why was he killed? And what are the mysterious purple soda cans all about? And Tigger? What is she doing hanging around? Sarah and Max Bittersohn want to discover the answers to these questions before Dolph and Mary Kelling's charitable work is sabotaged and the SCRC given a bad name.

Sixth in the Professor Peter Shandy mystery series > Avid birdwatcher Professor Peter Shandy of Balaclava Agricultural College scans the wind-swept waters of Oozak's Pond. Suddenly, out from under the icecakes, up bobs a half-frozen corpse in a soggy suit of clothes nearly 100 years old. The body bears an unnerving resemblance to Balaclava Buggins, long-dead founder of the College. >President Thorkjeld Swenson implores Shandy to help solve the mystery--and help Balaclava College in its courtroom fight against Buggins' nasty and avaricious descendants, who have brought a particularly harebrained property law suit against the school. >While his wife, Helen, digs through the Buggins family archives, the Professor follows a series of bizarre clues that lead from a retired Arctic explorer and a scarlet woman named Flo to a convict who robbed the same place once too often...

Holly Howe is just beginning to succeed in in the cutthroat world of New York modeling when a car accident ruins her good looks forever and she is forced to retreat to the backwoods of Canada, to recuperate in her brother’s ramshackle country house. But Howe Hill is a wreck—dusty, ugly, and utterly lacking in modern facilities—and her brother is no more hospitable. So when Holly hears of a job in town taking care of Mrs. Partlett, an elderly, widowed invalid, she leaps at the opportunity. If nothing else, the Partlett mansion must have indoor plumbing. But Holly soon finds that while Cliff House is eerie by day, it’s terrifying by night. The other housekeeper is convinced it’s haunted by the ghost of Mr. Partlett, but Holly fears no poltergeist. It’s the old widow in the upstairs room that frightens her—and the secrets that lurk behind her dull, silver eyes. (from Publisher's book description at Amazon)

A mystery novel of sorts. Book 5 in the Peter Shandy series. The investigation of an agricultural disaster in the making turns into a bizarre fantasy. > Professors Peter Shandy and Timothy Ames, propagators of the world's most renowned rutabaga, are on a foreign mission, lending their expertise to the dilemma of the pestiferous Giant Hogweed which threatens to take over the lovely hedgerows of Britain. With them is Professor Daniel Stott, head of animal husbandry at Balaclava Agricultural Col lege. But is Dan secretly on the side of the hogweed? And whose side is the hogweed on? Is it possible for even a plant fifteen feet tall to behave with such calculated malignity? >Fleeing the groves of academe for a spot of fieldwork, the three cross the border into Wales, forgetting this is the land of Merlin, where enchantments run rife and every rabbit hole has a white rabbit in it. They'd gladly have settled for just a rabbit. What they get is a loudly disenchanted giant searching for the King's pet griffin under pain of eternal banishment from the arms of his often-betrothed. Before they can explain they haven't time to hunt griffins, Peter, Tim, and Dan are trapped by the hogweed and forced into an adventure that's pretty bizarre even by the standards to which Peter Shandy has become accustomed. >Aided by Dan Stott's knowledge of The Chronicles of Narnia and Miss Hilda Horsefall's recipe for homemade lye soap, however, the Hercule Poirot of the turnip fields triumphs again.