Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

"When the body of a young, pregnant woman washes ashore on a stretch of barren beach at Boston Harbor, Boston homicide detective Rocky Patel writes to FBI agent Poppy Rice for help in identifying the Jane Doe. But the crime lab comes up empty, and not until a year and a half later does an anonymous tip to the Boston PD reveal the woman to be the wayward daughter of a prominent, Irish-American political family." "Just days before the ID, an Irish-born Boston fire marshal (and old flame) asks Poppy to look into another case. It seems that more than thirty years earlier, a pregnant woman's corpse was discovered on the island of Inishmore. A group of women, led by the fire marshal's mother, secretly buried the body (the church would not have allowed burial in consecrated ground) but saved a lock of the dead girl's hair. The marshal, knowing Poppy is better than he is at cutting through red tape, appeals to her on his mother's behalf. She agrees to set up a DNA test, which soon confirms her gut feeling that the two drownings, while separated by thirty years and an ocean, are somehow linked." "Teaming up with the inimitable Rocky Patel, Poppy sets out in search of truth and justice and instead finds herself ensnared in a web of political deceit, family intrigue, and out-and-out bad guys. As always, she rises to the occasion."--BOOK JACKET.

"Poppy Rice is home in her DC apartment with very little furniture and a stack of boxes she still hasn't unpacked after five years. It's 2 A.M. and she's suffering from her usual insomnia, so she watches a tape of the CBS Evening News. Dan Rather is interviewing convicted ax-murderer Rona Leigh Glueck, who in ten days will be the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. Poppy pauses the tape on a close-up of Rona Leigh's delicate, childlike hands." "So maybe it was a lightweight ax.". "Poppy digs out Rona Leigh's case file to find - along with the grisly crime-scene photos - a physician's testimony that glee, not muscle, gave her the strength to commit the crime. When her public defender asked the crime lab for help determining whether such a frail woman, only seventeen years old, could physically commit these murders, he was turned away for not filing the correct paperwork.". "With the reluctant support of her colleague and sometime lover, Joe Barnow, the impetuous and relentless Poppy reopens the investigation to find out if Rona Leigh deserves a certificate that will read: Death by Legal Homicide as Ordered by the State of Texas."--BOOK JACKET.

As such things are measured in Washington, Denise Burke has everything a woman of wit could want: two hip kids, a marriage carefully constructed to allow maximum mutual leeway with a husband smack in the center of Bill Clinton's inner circle, and a high-profile lover, the most eligible bachelor on Capitol Hill. Plus she's a best-selling author of true-crime books. When her congressman lover urges Denise to look into an old murder in his home district - and then just as urgently begs her to drop the whole thing - her stubborn streak kicks in. And when he dies in flagrante with a D.C. call girl, her bullshit detector goes on red alert: The good congressman didn't have to pay for sex. But it's when death strikes a lot closer to home that Denise becomes a woman with a big-time problem. Someone is serious about getting her to drop the old case.

With novel after novel, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith has proven to be an American writer of great depth and extraordinary talent. Her stories have the stunning clarity of 20/20 vision that sees the inner forces behind human behavior along with the outer events that shape our world. This newest work, Masters of Illusion, is a stunning accomplishment. With a reporter's eye, Smith re-creates an unforgettable tragedy, the Hartford circus fire of 1944 that left 169 people dead and over a thousand injured. And with a writer's vision, she tells a moving story about two people who search to find the truth behind the catastrophe - and discover the secrets hidden in their own lives. Because World War II has sent so many men overseas, the excited crowd gathering at the July 6, 1944, circus matinee to see the Flying Wallendas, clown Emmett Kelly, and the fabulous animal acts of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth are mostly women and children. So are the victims of the fire. Margie Potter is the youngest child to survive, yet she won't even remember the flames that claim her mother's life and leave her own back scarred. The Hartford fireman she meets and marries eighteen years later, Charlie O'Neill, was only ten the summer of the fire, but the terrifying day has stayed in his mind - so vividly that he can never forget it. Masters of Illusion is Margie and Charlie's story - a story of investigation, of peeling back the layers of the past to discover what really happened. The fire may have been a tragic accident, no one knows for sure, but Charlie is convinced it was an act of deliberate murder. His and Margie's twenty-five-year hunt for evidence will end up revealing the emotional and physical scars she doesn't even know are there. And this story of suspense will become a portrayal of a woman's dramatic awakening as she faces the facts of her life and the stripping away of illusions she has embraced throughout her girlhood and marriage. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's skill makes the reader part of the process, a witness to the fire and its aftermath, to human frailty and transformation. Gradually, what seems like senseless tragedy is tinged with purpose, and the tension builds until the final, chilling page of this brilliantly crafted, deeply beautiful, and wonderfully wise book.

Relates the experiences of Mattie and Jo after they join the Peace Corps.

A novel of psychological suspense about a woman whose life takes a shocking turn when a young girl contacts her, claiming to be her daughter, kidnapped in Mexico years earlier, from the New York Times bestselling author of Someone is Watching. A lifetime ago, every year Caroline Shipley looked forward to her wedding anniversary. But then a celebratory trip to Mexico for the occasion with her husband and friends ended in the unsolved kidnapping of her infant daughter, Samantha. Now, fifteen years after that horrific time, divorced and isolated,Caroline is forced to relive the kidnapping by reporters who call every year on the anniversary of Samantha’s disappearance. However, this year when the phone rings, Caroline hears the sweet voice of a girl claiming to be her long-lost daughter. Plunged back into the world of heartbreak, suspicion and questions that led the case to run cold so many years ago, Caroline doesn’t know what or who to believe. But when she starts to figure it out, she finds the answers dangerously close to home.