Frances Louise Davis Lockridge

When Winifred and Orson Otis went swimming nude just before dawn, the last thing they expected was to be sharing the pool — especially with Winifred's uncle who was by now quite dead. And when the Otises later uncovered another corpse, Captain Heimrich of the state police thought it wise to keep an eye on the young couple. And it's a good thing, since by this time, the Otises had engaged in their own brand of reluctant, but effective sleuthing.

Children's picture book. A shy new cat named Sammy helps Marta adjust to the move to a new house.

Pam and Jerry North solve the murders of a talk-show host (The long skeleton);  one of Jerry's authors (Murder is suggested);  another of Jerry's authors (Murder has its points); and a fellow guest at a Florida resort (Murder by the book).    Mix a Martini, very dry and very cold, and indulge in these four delightful mysteries by the Lockridges. .

Two men murdered and an unpublished manuscript of local history destroyed.

It starts quite innocently on Fifth Avenue on a cheerful autumn day . . . and all because a young physicist, Evans Parten, happens to meet an attractive girl, Alison Kent, and invites her to lunch with him the following Saturday. He rings her doorbell on schedule, but the redhead who answers denies ever having seen or heard of Alison Kent. Evans concludes that he has been stood up. But while brooding in his car opposite the apartment house, who should come out but Alison, walking close to a dark-haired man who looks as if he may be holding a gun in his coat pocket. Losing their trail, Evans reports the matter to the police and, indeed, it develops that something is up and some very tough eggs are involved in it. A breathtaking Lockridge chase follows with the panic-stricken girl, Evans, two engaging Manhattan detectives—and the reader—careening down a deadly path from a warehouse on the upper East Side to a freighter docked downtown; while murder, with a Spanish accent, stalks through a night of shadows.

It was the middle of a sunny May morning when the old man, thin and shabby, suddenly collapsed on the driveway of Captain Merton Heimrich of the New York State police. He was Old Tom, self-appointed handyman for the community of Van Brunt, New York, and someone had shot him. The question was, why would anyone care enough about this harmless eccentric, this roving gardener, to want to kill him? Is there more to Old Tom than a look at his unkempt person and ramshackle living quarters would indicate? As Heimrich starts his investigation the killer coolly sets his sights on a new victim.

The house Constance Dale inherits is an enormous Victorian creation in Westchester County. When she arrives from the West Coast to try to dispose of it, it has been deserted for months. Or so she thinks. But little things soon prove her wrong: The grandfather clock ticks busily. Lights go on in a theoretically empty room. A cry sounds faintly in the night. And to increase her unease, a neighbor-who would be attractive if he weren't so suspicious (in both senses of the word) — keeps turning up at odd moments. One little out-of-place circumstance after another leads Constance to an unfamiliar part of the house and a room where a stolen child has been hidden. Then her struggle begins, a struggle to save herself and the child, a fight for life that sends her racing through the old house and into the unfamiliar countryside, and catapults her into greater danger than before. In this crisp, fast-paced story, the excitement of distinguishing friend from enemy and hunter from hunted keeps the reader absorbed until the nerve-tingling conclusion.

Murder mystery, in which a British poet, on an academic assignment in New York, is the protagonist.

When Captain Heimrich and Susan Faye walked into the scene, beautiful actress Peggy Belford was stretched across the floor, a bullet through her chest. Across the room, slumped in a chair is the corpse of Brian Collins, the master of the house. A gun lies on the floor beneath his limp hand. It looks like an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide, yet something about the scene looks phony to Heimrich. He begins an investigation that takes him to the set of the movie Peggy was making before her demise. Since most of these people do their best acting in real life, it's a tough case for Heimrich and Faye, and they had better solve it before another murder/suicide — theirs — is staged.

Pam and Jerry North investigate the murder of a tennis official, but the case becomes more complex when the chief suspect is also found murdered.

Lois Williams watched old Mrs. Montfort sign her will and had no foreboding of the terror that was to follow. At most, she felt a small chill, which she absent-mindedly attributed to the damp coolness of Mrs. Montfort's pre-Revolutionary house. Yet later she is startled by an odd similarity between the voice of a young woman at the village inn and the remembered voice of the old woman. Explaining the event to Bob Oliver, editor of the Glenville Advertiser, Lois tries to call it coincidence. So does Bob—until he learns of a fatal mugging in Greenwich Village and has a talk with sad-faced Detective Nathan Shapiro of the Manhattan Police Force. Then they are caught in a mystery of elusive identities, disjointed telephone calls—and an unnamed terror that pursues them down a narrow, winding road and into a blinding storm. They are, in fact, involved in big-M murder, playing a defensive game against a ruthless killer.

Murder is Suggested but no one knows for sure. When blondes suddenly emerge from empty closets and cats go into trances, a missing psychologist might have been murdered, or he might be the victim of a disappearing act with a tragic ending. The only certainty is that Professor Jameson Elwell is dead, shortly after Jerry North had published the man's latest book on hypnosis. With few clues to guide them, Mr. and Mrs. North concentrate on the available suspects: Roscoe Finch, the professor's future son-in-law; Faith and Hope Oldham, a psychology student and her mother; and Carl Hunter, a research assistant. Here's a spellbinding mystery featuring two of America's favorite sleuths.

It began when Professor Walter Brinkley gave a cocktail party for the newly-wed Craigs. He had no intention of mixing the ingredients for murder and mayhem at his gathering, but his party turned out to be the beginning of a nightmare that shattered the peace of quiet Westchester County. When Caroline Wilkins, the beautiful wife of a naval officer, is shot while sun-bathing, Captain Heimrich is called in to investigate and very quickly begins to amass some spectacular facts about the lovely victim. Just when he starts piecing together the puzzle, murder #2 occurs, and the captain can use all the help he can get.

The slaying of a notorious city playboy and the disappearance of a successful young cartoonist are the kick-off for this lively-as-always Lockridge tale of murder and mystery. When attractive Ann Dillard from Westchester, in New York for the day, finds herself stood up by her fiancé and receives a curiously vague note from him, she is puzzled and concerned. Can Clark's disappearance have anything to do with the murder of Sonny Underwood? Unable to leave the question unanswered, she sets out on a quest marked by strange incidents and threatened with danger. As the day progresses, confusion gathers momentum and peculiar individuals drift into Ann's search, including the bewildering Ferris and his sidekick, Yorke, whose perplexing changes of character occur regularly. By nightfall another murder has been committed and the action moves to the dark hills of Westchester County, where Captain Bill Weigand and a curious group assemble for the finale and Ann's clear-headed aunt proves herself handy with a gun.

Sailing to Havana, Mr. and Mrs. North find their vacation dogged by death Stepping out of her stateroom, Pamela North is rather disappointed to see a man with a sword. She had hoped this cruise would be a respite from murder, mayhem, and crime, and she finds pirates to be dreary. As it happens, she’s wrong on all counts. The man with the sword is no pirate, and this trip will not offer an escape from death. As the ship embarks on an eight-day voyage to Havana and Nassau, the Norths will find the sword-bearing gentleman is far from the strangest passenger onboard. The Carib Queen transports daiquiri-swilling dowagers, a bizarre private detective, and at least one jewel thief. And when one of their fellow passengers is found with a sword buried in his chest, Pamela and Jerry must find the killer—or risk spoiling their entire vacation.

"Here's to Death." This would have been an appropriate toast on the stroke of midnight for the New Year's Eve party at the plush country house of John Halley in Westchester County. Within two hours he had been murdered twice! A heavy snowstorm isolated the house, roads were closed, and finally the power failed leaving the once gay guests shivering in cold rooms while further terrors walked the halls. Discovery of John Halley's stiff body in the lake interrupted the holiday plans of the redoubtable Captain Heimrich, of the New York State Police, who worked with unusual speed to separate the innocent from the guilty. He was not fast enough, however, to prevent an effective hatchet job on a guest who had seen too much. But as the electric company mended broken lines to restore lifegiving power and the first snowplow opened the road to the outside world, the villain was meshed in Captain Heimrich's net.