Chapter One

Alpha and Omega
Sunday, February 1, 2015 – 1:47 a.m.

Twenty-plus years with the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office taught Jonathan Gray to expect the unexpected. But Washington Square Park had always been a tranquil haven on the fringe of the French Quarter. So crime-scene tape draping the square’s wrought-iron fence presented the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Moonlight filtering through stately live oaks cast eerie—almost funereal—shadows, adding to the dissonance.

Fluttering in the nippy midwinter breeze, the neon-yellow ribbon communicated

a mute warning. On this side, normalcy. On the other, insanity. Stepping into the dysfunction never got easier. Regardless, turning back wasn’t an option. As if speaking the incantation aloud would immunize him against the unfolding drama, he repeated his trite pre-crime scene mantra: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” His breath lingered in the frosty air before evaporating.

After checking in with the uniformed officer monitoring access, Jonathan angled toward floodlights illuminating a temporary canopy above the city’s AIDS memorial. More tape—red as opposed to yellow—identified the innermost “Do Not Cross” perimeter. Crime scene technicians in white Tyvek protective suits busied themselves measuring and photographing what must be the reason he’d been summoned. A male corpse sitting upright on the ground—its arms and legs twisted at seemingly impossible angles—leaned against the memorial’s circular cut-glass and steel panels surrounded by a pool of thick, dark-crimson liquid.

A curved, nearly rectangular piece of wood with brass edges—most likely a knife handle—protruded from under the right side of the dead man’s rib cage. A portion of his intestines spilled out of the wound. A second knife—its handle and part of its blade visible—had been thrust downward into the soft tissue between the left collarbone and neck.

Cause of death seemed too obvious to require someone of Jonathan’s seniority. A first-year med student could have made the call. But markings carved into the dead man’s forehead and chest hinted at something more sinister. No wonder Mitch Broussard from NOPD had called him in the middle of the night. The man’s heavy flannel shirt lay open, exposing his chest and a series of

capital letters etched into his skin. The letters—G I D I A I D I V—made no sense, at least not in English. A folded piece of paper with similar letters and other symbols, not quite readable from that distance, lay under the man’s left hand. Lack of blood covering the letters in the chest signaled they had been added postmortem. Jonathan focused on two marks in the man’s forehead. An uppercase “A” and what looked like an upside-down horseshoe—the Greek letter Omega—apparently cut while the victim was still alive.

It couldn’t have been two years already. But there it was. Alpha and Omega. Jonathan bit his lip and cursed under his breath. Then, a silent prayer. Looked like the nightmare was about to begin—again.

One of the CSTs stood and raised her clear face shield. “Hey, Doc. Welcome to Funsville.”

Excerpt from SHADOWS OF FRENCHMEN by Michael Rigg. Copyright 2026 by Michael Rigg. Reproduced with permission from Michael Rigg. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

“Americans,” said my goddaughter, licking cheese and tomato sauce off her fingers, “eat twenty-three pounds of pizza every year.”

I looked at her suspiciously. There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that Lily is precocious for a seven-year-old, but she also sometimes falls prey to what in artificial intelligence is known as hallucinations, and makes things up if she believes they’ll create a better story. “I don’t eat twenty-three pounds of pizza,” I said, even though we were in fact sitting at the Provincetown House of Pizza and contributing to the statistic.

“Not every American,” Lily conceded. “It’s an average.” She brightened. “So that means, some people eat way more than that!”

“That’s a lot of pizza,” I agreed. The truth is, I do regard it as a treat of sorts. I am part-owner of the Race Point Inn in Provincetown’s East End, and pizza is never featured on our Michelin-starred restaurant’s menu.

Besides, I like spending time with my goddaughter. When my best friend Mirela brought Lily back from Plovdiv in Bulgaria—where her sister had regarded the baby as an inconvenience and readily signed adoption papers so Mirela could bring Lily to the States—I hadn’t been quite as enthused. (To be fair, neither had Mirela: if there were ever someone who manifested zero maternal instincts, it’s her. As a mother, she’s something of a work in progress. That had not, however, stopped her from once becoming the fiercest mother bear ever out in the dunes when the baby’s life was threatened.)

In my defense, there aren’t that many non-parents who can truly embrace the demands of a baby, which morphed into the demands of a toddler, which finally metamorphosed into the very smart conversations one could now have with the girl sitting at the table with me.

“Did you know,” she said, “that some indigenous people call the earth Turtle Island?”

“I did not,” I said. She knows the word indigenous. Of course she does. “Are you going to eat that piece?”

She shook her head, intent on her thought. “The way the turtle shell is curved works okay for half the earth,” she said. “That makes sense. But what about the bottom half? And where does the turtle sit, or stand, and how come people don’t fall off the turtle? And if we’re on Turtle Island, why don’t we just float away? But if we did, what would we be floating on top of?”

“Good questions,” I said. Somewhere in the back of my mind an expression flitted by, turtles all the way down, but I couldn’t remember who said it or what it meant, and didn’t want to further complicate the conversation. I picked up the last slice of pizza and took a bite. “You could look them up and see.”

“Aunt Sydney,” she said to me with dramatic excessive patience, “I already did. I know how to do research! But no one knows.”

When I was seven, I probably didn’t even know the word research. I sighed. Maybe she could make it her dissertation topic. At the rate she was going, that was probably going to happen sometime next year. “It’s their story,” I said. “Lots of cultures have stories to explain how things work.”

“But if everybody’s got a different story, how do we know which one is true?”

We’d gone from alimentation to geography to metaphysics in under four minutes, which had to be a record of some kind. I was rescued by the arrival of my husband. “I see you didn’t save me any pizza,” he said, sitting down at the table and reaching over to tousle Lily’s hair.

“Didn’t know you were coming,” I said.

“Uncle Ali,” said Lily, “How do we know whose story is true?”

“Story?” He raised his eyebrows, amused, and gave me a smile, which always—even after twelve years together—takes my breath away. Ali is Lebanese-American, and is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.

“Origin myths,” I told him. “Turtle Island.”

He said to Lily, “Truth can be different from facts, you know? Different stories are true for different people. In my religion, we don’t think the world started with a turtle. We think Allah created it, and did it in seven days.” He paused. “Does that sound like a fact to you?”

She shook her head. “My mom can’t even do a painting in seven days, sometimes,” she said.

“So they’re not facts, our stories, but even if we know they’re not factual, they tell us some truths about who we are,” he said.

“What truths does your story tell?”

He considered the question. Ali always treats Lily like a miniature adult. It works okay more often than not. “Well, it tells me that Allah is good, because the earth is good. It tells me Allah pays attention. It reminds me that he wants me to live in a way that I pay attention, too. And I think that people who tell the story of Turtle Island must be very close to the earth and nature, and the turtle reminds them of that.”

“Okay.” She was probably filing it all away to ask Mirela about later. “Are you going to order a pizza?”

Ali smiled. “I think not,” he said. “I was just passing and saw your Aunt Sydney’s car here so thought I’d stop in to say hello, because I haven’t seen you in forever.”

“It hasn’t been forever, Uncle Ali,” Lily said seriously. “It was last week.”

“Well, it feels like forever,” he said. “What are you ladies doing after lunch?”

“I don’t know about Lily,” I said, “but this lady has work to do.”

“You have to take me home first,” Lily said.

“I know.”

“My mom gave me the key,” Lily said.

“I know. She told me. And you haven’t lost it?”

She made a face. “Of course not, Aunt Sydney. I’m responsible.”

“You certainly are,” I said, smiling. I stood up and began clearing the table. “Want to help me with this? What time’s your mom coming home?”

She finished her soda, sucking noisily on the straw. “When she’s done at the gallery.”

That could be anytime. Mirela isn’t just any artist; even in Provincetown—itself an important art colony, the oldest continuous one in North America—she’s one of the town’s hottest artists. She came to P’town from Bulgaria one summer to work, back when Bulgarian students came here in droves; they still come, but in somewhat smaller numbers; Provincetown is changing. She spent that first summer waiting tables at Joon Bar and The Mews, driving a pedicab, and painting seascapes, mostly of the harbor. The paintings sold, and she stayed on, eventually becoming a US citizen; but over those years her style changed. Now she creates abstract works that sell for tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s also marginally psychic, and some of her paintings carry eerie messages that scare the hell out of me.

Lily is, of course, her loudest critic, and often complains that her work doesn’t look like anything in particular; I privately agree with that assessment.

Very privately.

Ali stood up and opened his arms for a hug. “I’ll see you soon, habibi,” he said. It’s an Arabic endearment he reserves for Lily. He generally uses Italian ones with me. He thinks they make him sound sexy.

He’s right.

Lily duly deposited at Mirela’s house in the West End, Ali and I returned to the Race Point Inn, which was doing its usual brisk business. It was late June, the start of the tourist season, when Provincetown’s population makes the switch from three thousand residents in the winter to eighty thousand in the summer. The inn’s open year-round, and we’re generally booked up completely from April to December. I’ve been part of the inn now, one way or another, for over fourteen years, and yet am still absorbing what that entails: people, people, and more people.

Ali disappeared into our residence, which is the penthouse on the top floor of the inn, and I went in search of Wendy, the inn’s manager and—I could swear—magician. She soothed ruffled feathers, dealt with crises, handled difficult people, all the things I’m not terribly good at. We all have our areas of specialty.

Mine is murder.

***

That’s not really true, of course; I haven’t actually killed anybody yet, though I’ve come close a few times. In my fantasies, anyway. No; as Julie Agassi, the head of the Provincetown Police detective unit, tells it, if there’s a dead body anywhere in town, I’m going to be the one to have found it. Or known about it. Or been somehow involved with it. And it’s true that I seem to have a Jessica Fletcher/Miss Marple-level of amateur connection to crime.

It started one summer morning when I went to take an early dip in the Race Point’s pool—at the time, I was employed as the inn’s wedding coordinator—and found the body of my boss floating in the water with me. A thousand times ick, as well as a sorrow I’ve never really gotten over: Barry had been the kindest, gentlest man I’d ever known.

So of course I wanted to be part of bringing his killer to justice.

After that, it felt somehow natural for me to be on the scene of other crimes. Provincetown isn’t very big, and my work brings me into contact with a tremendous number of people, so it’s logical, really, that I’d have more success in figuring things out than would the State Police, dispatched from up-Cape to investigate homicides and not necessarily all that familiar with our little quirks down here.

And quirky doesn’t even begin to describe Provincetown. The town is a vibrant art colony. It’s also a gay-resort destination. And an old fishing village that still retains the remnants of the commercial fleet, along with the Portuguese families who worked it. Once upon a time, one of the whaling capitals of the world. And before that, the summer home of an indigenous population. All that history, all that mix makes for people who most decidedly do not do things by the book. Some outsiders find that disconcerting.

I find it… home.

Wendy was sitting in the empty restaurant drinking coffee and going over the evening’s menu with Martin, the maître d’. “It doesn’t matter; she says we have to take it off,” he was saying.

I pulled up a chair. “Take what off?”

“The salmon en croute,” said Martin. “She is not pleased with the quality of today’s delivery.”

Wendy was shaking her head. “Seriously? I don’t get it. Everybody likes salmon,” she objected. “Even people who don’t like fish, like salmon. She’s got it; for heaven’s sake, what else does she want to do with it?”

Martin made a face; I could only imagine what “she” had said to do with it. She was, of course, Adrienne the diva chef, by whose graces we had earned and kept our Michelin rating. She also had absolutely no care for anybody’s feelings; staff had been known to quit their first night of service because she’d completely terrorized them. My co-owner, Mike, seemed to be the only person who took her tantrums in stride. “It is not a local fish,” Martin was saying, his French accent somehow making the remark more persuasive. “And she has two other piscatory dishes on the menu…”

Wendy snorted. “For heaven’s sake,” she said again, but she said it with resignation. We all knew the truth: what Adrienne the diva chef wanted, Adrienne the diva chef got. “I’m going to have to reprint the menus.”

“Such is the nature of our curious enterprise,” said Martin, shrugging; he knows which battles to fight. He turned to me. “Sydney? Was there something you needed?”

“I wanted to check in with Wendy about the TV crew,” I said. We were being featured on one of the local-things-to-do, early-evening programs out of Boston, which was both a Good Thing—it helps to be known as a Weekend Waypoints destination—and also was going to be disruptive of staff and guests alike.

“Arriving tomorrow morning,” she said, changing gears briskly and seemingly effortlessly. “Mike wants you to do the interview, did he tell you?”

“He did.” Mike and I had become co-owners of the inn when its former owner gave up Provincetown for Amsterdam and his new love. Mike had been the manager, so he slipped easily into the role of keeping on top of the practical side of things, whereas once I gave up coordinating weddings, I tended more toward the public-relations side of ownership, attended business guild meetings, helped organize events, went off-Cape to conferences… and, apparently, did interviews for Boston television stations.

I also valued Wendy’s impressive organizational skills. “Where do you suggest it will disrupt people the least? The interview, I mean? The part I’m doing?”

“You’re doing the whole part,” she corrected me. “You’re going to have to stick with them, and take the producers to lunch here, I have a table for you at one o’clock.” She pulled out her smartphone and started scrolling. “Juliet Mills and Bruce Peterson,” she read. “And rooms thirty-four and eighteen will be empty and prepared for the cameras, but you have to be out of eighteen by lunchtime because we have an early arrival for it.”

I raised my eyebrows ever so slightly. “Thirty-four? Do you think that’s a good idea? You know they’ll have done their homework.” I could still hear Lily’s voice saying she knew how to do research; there was absolutely no way television producers didn’t.

It wasn’t that thirty-four is a bad room—it’s actually quite nice, with antique furnishings and a window overlooking the largest of our patios, the one with the arbor. It had been two years since Ali and I had stood on that patio exchanging wedding vows when we were interrupted by a man’s body falling very nearly on top of us.

From room thirty-four.

“They requested it,” said Wendy. “It adds a little pizzazz, knowing a murder happened here.”

Two murders, in fact, if you counted the body in the pool years before that. My instinct was to downplay that particular facet of the Race Point’s claims to fame. But Wendy leaned into it, and her decision had proved successful. There was even talk, sometimes, of a possible haunting. And people liked that. “Your call,” I said, making a face.

“I’ve put together a schedule,” Wendy went on, her voice brisk. Potential ghosts weren’t playing into her agenda—for the day, at least. “They’ll spend the morning shooting the inn, then after lunch they’ll go down Commercial Street, do shots of the town. They call it B-roll. Back here for a wrap-up before dinner service starts. Nine of them in all: producers, director, the on-air talent, and cameras and sound.”

“Okay.” I knew better than to argue: Wendy knew what she was doing. Nothing could go wrong.

Which just goes to show how little I understand about fate, or life, or anything.

***

Excerpt from Trafficking in Murder by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Copyright 2026 by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Reproduced with permission from Jeannette de Beauvoir. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The car bumped hard, the undercarriage hitting the edge of the shoulder, as it careened off the Garden State Parkway, heading for a stand of trees. The bump woke me up, and I jammed on the brakes and fought the steering wheel, cutting it hard left, but it was too late. The car fishtailed as the front smashed into a tree, the rear swinging right as the brakes took hold and crashing into another tree. I was flung forward, my hands coming off the wheel and banging against the console.

My hands were cut and bleeding as I sat staring at the road, the car twisted at a forty-five-degree angle. Pain throbbed from my right temple, and I realized I must have hit the windshield or the roof. A heaviness pressed down inside my head above my eyes, and I felt an urge to close them and go to sleep.

I forced myself to stay awake and get out of the car. I knew I was still technically drunk, but the crash had pumped enough adrenaline into my veins that I was hyper-aware, despite the likely concussion. I tried to open the trunk, but it was stuck shut, the right fender crunched in and bent on the top where it met the hatch.

A car passed going north on the other side of the Parkway. I looked back up the south-bound lane and saw no traffic. I stepped onto the road and half-jogged across, stepping over the median and across the north-bound lane. I glanced back at the car, slanted cock-eyed in the grass just past the Exit 6 sign for North Wildwood, then hurried through the grassy stretch alongside the road and into the woods that bordered it.

My only thought now was to avoid getting a DUI. I could deal with the car later. What a disaster. I had just bought the damn thing yesterday afternoon from a guy in Buena with a badly running nose and a burning desire to take my cash and go meet someone to make him well. That’s what I got for taking a lead on a cheap car from a guy holding up the end of the bar at a beer-and-a-shot place down the street from my house. I could have asked Lou to hook me up, but the price was right, and I just wanted something to get me through the summer. So I hitched a ride to Buena from a buddy who was headed to Margate, where I met Drew, the guy with the dripping nose. Drew had that pressing business to attend to, so he was fine with giving me the uncompleted paperwork.

Drew said, “Just see Mitch at the title place here next week, he’ll handle it.”

I trudged through the patch of woods, distancing myself from the Parkway. I came to a two-lane road and ran across that into deeper woods on the other side. I was about ready to just sleep under a tree there, when through a gap in the branches I saw an open field.

I pushed forward to the perimeter of the woods and stopped, trying to make out where I was. If it was somebody’s back yard, I would have to be careful. But there were no lights, just a dark field spreading out before me. I looked to my left and saw a brighter patch on the ground and a hundred yards beyond that a low building, maybe a garage?

I walked through tall grass to shorter grass, and as I got closer to the bright patch, I realized what it was: a sand trap.

I was on a fairway of Wildwood Country Club, the home course of my friend Lou Scolletta, whose house I was supposed to have been at four hours ago. There was probably a caddie shack I could hide out in, but I opted for a makeshift bed in the grass of a hollow a few fairways over. I lay down and, in the brief period before I passed out, wondered if this was the best way to prepare for the first day on my new job.

* * *

There was no way I wanted a full-time job working for Lou. I knew just enough about Lou to know not knowing anything more was the prudent path. The fact that he had just fired the prior manager for dipping in the till did not make the opportunity more appealing.

But there was a crazy part of me that thought running a place—a restaurant, not McNabb’s Tavern, the decrepit neighborhood tappie in Southwest Philly where until last year I humped kegs, mopped up fluids, breathed a lot of smoke and told myself I was the “manager”—might be something I could do. Because I was nowhere right now. No degree, no trade—just fifteen years of bartending that had ended when the last McNabb standing decided—wisely—that this was no way to make a living. The new owners didn’t need a mug like me in the fern bar that McNabb’s was to become.

I knew The Seabreeze, the quintessential Jersey Shore restaurant. When Lou bought it six years ago, I helped out a few weekends bartending when some of the corner boys he had hired just disappeared on him. It wasn’t hard finding someone to cover for me at McNabb’s. Our weekends were slower in the summer anyway, with a lot of folks going to the shore.

Lou and I hung out more back then. He bought the place in 1977 when I was thirty and Lou maybe thirty-seven. It was sort of a vanity project for him; his main business was a Cadillac dealership in South Philly. The following summer, he showed up at my bar with his son Davy—guess the kid was sixteen. He wanted Davy to get a summer job. Could we take him on, washing dishes, whatever? I wondered why he didn’t hire him at the dealership, but I guess he wanted him to work for someone else.

So I hired him, and he was okay, typical teenager, hardly said a word. There really wasn’t that much to do—we had a kitchen and did some sandwiches, but it wasn’t much to keep a dishwasher busy.

I guess that was the first favor I did for Lou. And I did owe him big, seeing as how his dad got me out of the draft back in 1967. Plus, Lou got me my first restaurant job, which was really a pretty good gig at a nice South Philly restaurant. But with Lou, you never felt like he was looking for payback. He just came off as a great guy, not like he was some connected dude that you had to say yes to. I’m sure he sold a lot of cars seeming like a great guy.

I used to give Davy a ride home sometimes, which often led to Concetta—Lou’s wife—asking me in to eat. There was always food, loads of food. She’d give me a plate of pasta, red wine out of a jug—might be ten o’clock in the evening, but so what? Then Lou would show up, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelash that I was there. Then he had me down to a little mom-and-pop restaurant near his dealership for dinner, and I met some of his friends. They were mostly older and had gone to Bishop Neumann or Southern, but a few knew guys from Kingsessing, my old neighborhood in Southwest Philly.

I thought about that pasta and how a mick like me was going to run a real restaurant, and, as I passed out in the wet grass at 3:30 AM, whether Davy was still having the same nose-dripping problems as Drew from Buena, a path I saw him starting down two and a half years ago.

* * *

The sound of a mower woke me up. The guy running it looked like he had seen worse. He pointed me to the caddy shack and gave me some coins for the payphone. Thank God Lou picked up, but then that’s Lou, he’s not surprised if some fuckup calls him at dawn. I washed up as best I could with cold water and no soap in the filthy sink in the shack’s bathroom, then waited outside the locker room, not wanting to meet up with anyone, until Lou arrived.

What a night. Blitzed out of my mind, drinking stingers like I was twenty in Somers Point, dancing with those crazy chicks, trying to teach me to moonwalk like Michael Jackson on that Motown show a couple of months ago. It was the Friday after a Monday Fourth of July, and it felt like the bar itself was stumbling under the strain of a week-long bender.

I had just stopped in for something to eat, then met these girls, three of them, late teens, which led to my dancing lesson. As it got late and the stingers took their toll, I figured maybe I’d just crash in the back seat for a couple of hours, then get breakfast somewhere, rather than roll in drunk at four in the morning and freak out Concetta.

Then two of the girls disappeared and the last one, Sharon, became glued to a chair at my table—that is, her butt was glued to the chair, but her face ended up stuck to the table itself, her long brown hair straggling out into the sticky remains of many ungodly drinks. At closing time, I struggled her to her feet and managed to get her to moan out where she was staying in Sea Isle City, a couple of towns south. After she vomited in the parking lot, I got her into the back seat and drove as carefully as I could, taking Route 9 to avoid the faster traffic.

I got the girl out of the car at her shabby rental duplex, leaving her sprawled on a chaise lounge in the screened porch. I banged on the door until one of her roommates appeared in a long t-shirt. We got her into bed and I talked the roommate through how to make sure Sharon didn’t choke on her own vomit.

I sat in my car, worrying about the girl. I was old enough to be her father, but being plastered in a Somers Point bar at closing time didn’t exactly qualify me to be in loco parentis. I was just a more experienced wastrel, a thirty-six-year-old failed bartender who would have been a disappointment to someone, if there was anyone left to fill that role.

When I left the girl’s rental, I figured it wasn’t much farther to Wildwood, and what the hell, why not take the Parkway? But of course, that’s what impaired judgment is all about. So fatigue and drunkenness once more exacted their toll on a stupid Irishman, and here I was creeping around at dawn like an escaped convict.

***

Excerpt from Wildwood Exit by Joel E. Turner. Copyright 2025 by Joel E. Turner. Reproduced with permission from Joel E. Turner. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Death in the Passage

The narrow alleyway walls muffled the gunshot as uptown Charlotte slept. It was one thirty in the morning on Tuesday, April 1.

The phone call didn’t last long.

“It’s me,” the caller said. “I need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

“I have a body.”

“Whose?”

“Chance Landry.”

“Where are you?”

“Lincoln Street. Inside the Rivafinoli Passage in South End. Next to the Queen Charlotte mural.”

“Anyone with you?”

The caller explained who else was still there.

“You leave. Tell them to stay with the body and wait for my call. I need to think.”

Three minutes later, the call was made to the only living person remaining in the passage who could help.

“I am going to text you an address.” Next, they explained what to do with Landry’s body when they got to the address.

“Are you kidding? He’s already dead.”

But the person giving instructions had no sense of humor. “Just do it.”

A text message followed with the address.

The person who received the message knew how to follow directions and did as they were told.

Chapter Two

Vengeance is Sweet

The 11:15 p.m. email on Craig Travail’s phone read: Your friends are about to suffer financial ruin, untold heartbreak, and trials and tribulations. You have only yourself to blame.

What?

Travail read the email again, slower this time. He read it twice more. There was no author name. Just an unknown vengeanceissweet email address.

Travail exhaled. His email checking practice was a bad habit, a routine held over from his career when clients expected their lawyers to be available 24/7.

Nothing good ever came of his itch to scratch his email in-box for late-night messages, like now, when it would be twice as difficult to sleep after watching the late night local news—with its smorgasbord of crimes, collisions, and natural disasters—and reading this email.

One news story was about elder fraud, a reminder of how susceptible retirees are to financial fraud schemes. Was that what was coming for his friends at the Independence Retirement Community, which everyone called the Indie? Were the residents about to suffer financial ruin because of risky investments? If so, he’d be angry at the perpetrators for their heartless guile and frustrated with his friends for being so gullible.

The television show made the point, though, and he agreed, that adults spend most of their lives collecting assets to make retirement possible and the rest of their days worried if their accumulated treasure will last as long as they do, leading some retirees to make risky and uninformed choices with their nest eggs. Was that what his friends had done? Made bad choices with their money? Is that what the emailer taunted him about?

Travail’s instinct was to fire off a harsh response to the email with some choice lawyer-like words and warnings, but he ignored the bait—he suspected they wouldn’t respond anyway—and he punched the remote control instead.

The television screen faded to black, and his den fell silent, save for Blue’s rhythmic snores and his jerking legs. Travail’s black and tan coonhound must be dreaming, chasing ducks along the lake behind Travail’s cottage, as he was apt to do in real life, and as usual, failing to catch the waterfowl before they darted back into the water. Travail leaned over his club chair’s arm and let his free hand graze on Blue’s back until his pet stopped running in his sleep.

Maybe the email was a prank. Maybe, like him, a friend had become bored with life at the Indie. And yet, the email bothered him.

Whose lives—which friends’ lives—were about to be shattered? And how? And for that matter, why? And what did he have to do with it?

Since moving a year earlier into the Independence Retirement Community, Travail had made two best friends, Harriet Keaton and Yeager Alexander, and several other good friends. He’d met many other retirees, some whose company he tolerated and some whose company he could do without. Either way, he didn’t want to see anyone hurt. He certainly didn’t want his close friends to suffer, and he didn’t want to be the person responsible for their pain.

The flame on the candle he’d lit this morning was down to the base of the wick. He turned away from it, detesting the severe loneliness of March 31.

There was no logic for feeling so alone—what with all the crimes, court cases, and historic mysteries Harriet, Yeager, and he navigated since he arrived at the Indie and the time they spent together—but it was hard to control his feelings, especially the feeling of being by himself. A Jewish resident told him about the tradition of lighting a candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. It felt loving to strike the match in Rachael’s honor, but as day became night, Travail’s mood shifted. It had been three years to the day.

The flickering light had a strobe-like effect on the things that reminded him of Rachael: her furniture, her quilts, her artwork, her pictures. Travail missed Rachael’s kindness, her playfulness, her creativity, and the rituals they shared. The flicker made the past too present, making him long for another night and morning and day together. She was here, there, and everywhere, but nowhere at all.

Assertive is what he’d needed to be in the moment that changed everything. He and Rachael were in the mountains at a high-elevation rental for a getaway when a freak storm rolled in and dumped six inches of snow on the ground. Rachael decided to drive to the local general store to stock the pantry for their cozy weekend together. He had a work call and offered to go with her after he finished.

“It’s just snow,” she’d said.

“Okay, but be careful,” he’d responded.

“Always, dear.” Then she kissed him on the mouth, patted his bottom, and walked out of his life forever.

The news came in a phone call from the local police. First came the shock, then the grief, and then the Monday-morning quarterbacking. He should have insisted Rachael let him drive her. He should have done more to protect her. If he had, maybe she would still be here. Maybe the out-of-control delivery truck that hit the black ice would have killed him instead of her, or maybe Travail could have prevented the accident.

Spring in North Carolina was supposed to be about new beginnings, not endings, with the dogwoods and azaleas in bloom, but his eyes grew wet from the memories, and he felt a sudden heaviness in his body.

He looked at the email again and became resolute. For sure, he would not make the same mistake twice with the people he cared about. He would protect them.

But who was behind the email?

Whoever wanted sweet vengeance against his friends wanted vengeance against him too, because their pain would be his pain. The question for his lawyer brain—used to solving riddles for years—was: who despised them and him that much?

Like an unexpected electric shock, the answer startled him. This email was exactly the kind of plot his nemesis, Robert Elkin, would conjure. If Elkin hurt Harriet, Yeager, and his other close friends, he hurt Travail worse.

But wasn’t Elkin no longer a threat? They’d exposed his concealment of the truth about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, avoided death at the hands of his father, pushed him out of his Big Law leadership position, and seen to it that the state bar took his law license. Elkin no longer had big-time lawyer power. The only thing he had was anger, resentment, and a low-paying job as a paralegal with a former client, though Travail didn’t know the client’s name or their business. It was a sharp drop from the level of influence that had made the man dangerous, and yet, there was reason to be cautious. Elkin was cunning and would hold a grudge till death do they part.

Travail leaned his head back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, and pondered the text again: financial ruin, untold heartbreak, and trials and tribulations.

Harriet was too smart to get caught up in a financial scam. Not so with Yeager. He was impulsive, likely to jump at the chance to possess something shiny because it might become shinier.

Travail pulled an olive-colored sweatshirt over his t-shirt, woke Blue, and took him into the backyard to do his business under the stars. While he waited, Travail glanced across Lost Cove Lake to Harriet’s cottage. He inhaled the fresh night air, and he marveled at the main building’s reflection on the lake’s surface. Harriet’s lights were out. She, an early riser, must be asleep.

Seeing Harriet’s peaceful cottage raised a question he’d been pondering. Should he ask her on a date? Carrie Roberts, the Indie Gossip Queen, thought so and often shared her opinion.

Most days, it seemed like the right decision not to ask Harriet—or anyone else, for that matter—on a date. Three years wasn’t that long, really, since Rachael died. And yet, here he was, caught in a web he’d spun for himself, trapped somewhere between what he no longer had and the companionship he wanted but resisted. Harriet was his friend. Should he keep it that way?

Harriet would most likely turn him down anyway. He was a project, and he knew it, starting with the lesson she’d had to teach him last year that retirement living is not life’s dead end but a fresh path forward. And now, with him being a sixty-six-year-old widower afraid to address his feelings, she’d be quick to beg off.

Blue finished up, and the two headed inside. His watch told him it was a new day. He blew out the dwindling flame on the candle and headed to his bedroom, where Blue was already curled up on the end of Travail’s queen-size bed. Wearing only striped boxers and a white cotton t-shirt, Travail pulled the covers up to his chin. With a good night’s sleep, he’d be fresh in the morning to put his effort into stopping Elkin. He still had his law license, after all, and as Yeager would tell him from time to time, “You ain’t dead yet.”

He closed his eyes and imagined tying a dry fly rig with two nymphs on a dropper line, the key to catching river trout on and below the surface at the same time. This falling-asleep system was better than counting backward from three hundred by threes. It worked its charm in less than five minutes.

Travail didn’t know when he dozed off that the murder train had left the station. He didn’t know when he began to snore that someone had already set the trap for his friends. And he didn’t know when he fell into a deep sleep that when the sun came up, he would ponder, and not for the first time, how he could have been so wrong to believe retirement living would ever be boring or lonely.

***

Excerpt from Deadly Gold Rush by Landis Wade. Copyright 2026 by Landis Wade. Reproduced with permission from Landis Wade. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Place the blame where it should go: on chocolate. The good stuff. The variety that melts way too fast as you swirl it over your tongue and let it cuddle the inside of your mouth, knowing the sensation is fleeting, which makes it more delicious. Yeah, that’s the kind I’m talking about.

I opened the front door of my Vegas condo and instantly tried to slam it. Except, the man I faced handed me a golden, foil-wrapped box with the unmistakable Godiva logo.

He placed it in the palm of his right hand and extended his arm. Then he stepped back. With elegance and skill, he had baited the hook, and I was snagged. Just like that.

I’m fast and grab the box before he could pull away. Or maybe that was his plan all along. If it hadn’t been for the lure of delectable dark chocolate, I would have stayed happily ignorant about sex slaves, black-market babies, cheating preachers, and an assortment of lowlifes that suddenly intruded on my cluttered, frazzled life.

If only I’d slammed the door, I would never have been rejected, arrested, and nearly exterminated.

Wait, did you just say, “Back the truck up”? Sorry, writing a memoir is new to me, and I just got overly excited to tell you everything. Instead, I’m taking some deep yoga-style breaths and will give you the whole story, nothing but the truth, just like it happened.

You see, at the stroke of another scorching Las Vegas summer midnight, I found myself feeling the still sizzling breeze swirling around my sleep shorts and tank top—front door open, air conditioning spewing out into the neighborhood. I stood and sniffed the corners of the box, knowing full well the pleasures that were inside. Why was this guy on my doorstep? It was wrong. It was a moment, much later, I wanted to stop time—like you can while watching Netflix. Instead, I ripped open the box, placed a scrumptious piece of heaven-on-earth into my mouth and eyed up and down what the devil had dumped on my doorstep.

Medical studies have proven it’s a bad idea to let a woman with PMS eat a pound of Godiva at one time, or so some new report said. Trust me, however. It’s an even worse idea to try to take chocolate away from a woman, PMS or not.

Fortunately, this guy certainly knew women. So he waited. I gobbled three more. In a row. Then handed him back the two-thirds empty box. I’m not greedy, see?

Forget whatever you’re thinking. This man was not a hunka, hunka burning love, but seemed to be my pudgy grandfather. Or a doppelgänger dressed collar to cuffs in glitter galore, gold, and some gosh-awful alligator-esque cowboy boots. In blood red.

He squinted in the light of the front steps of my townhouse/condo combo, and his chin dragged low. He grumbled, muttered, and withdrew his left hand from behind his back, producing yet another box with the chocolatier’s signature wrapping. I told you he was good. I salivated, snatched it, and stepped out of the way. I’m not addicted to the stuff; I just like it a lot, a whole lot.

Okay, that gives you the abbreviated version of why, five minutes later, my disgruntled relative was huddled on the beige sofa in the sterile Las Vegas condo that came with my current job. It does not explain why I was stomping up and down in front of him, but I’ll get to that. You see, I’m usually the one who solves problems; that’s my field, being I’m a minister and all.

You heard it right. I might not look like any preacher you’ve ever met, being that I’m rounded in all the right places, and I prefer a flashier wardrobe than you may have seen on church ladies. Like it or not, that’s me, Pastor Jane Angieski. I’m ordained and licensed, overly educated and fully confused a good portion of the time. I’ve been told, by the governing board of my denomination, that I should be more professional. It’s taken a long time and therapy, but I like me as I am.

You’re not the first, you know, to wonder how a flashy gal like me got into the ministry business. Most folks do not come straight out and ask because they’re dumbfounded to find out I know the Good News backward, forward, and well done in the middle. My response when they sputter a question or raise both eyebrows to the ceiling? “You see. They have quotas. Recall affirmative action? The denomination needed more females who had curves and padding in their ranks. There were plenty of string bean ones.”

Honestly? Hold on to something sturdy:

When I returned to college to finish my master’s, I was working part-time in retail at Victoria’s Secret, then at a mortuary where I applied makeup to the dearly departed. I also gave out contraceptives and condoms at a free clinic in Watts, and did some hard time asking, “Do you want fries with that?” Along the way, I made enough to avoid incurring huge debt. Psychology was to be my field. I am outrageously curious about people. We humans are so weird, and I love it.

One steamy Los Angeles day, I attended a program on campus because the AC in my apartment was broken. I also knew that with luck there’d be cake and coffee. The program, as I found out, was to recruit grad students into the ministry. It was probably the sugar talking, but I signed on the dotted line and started that summer attending seminary. Graduated with honors, accepted an assistant minister gig straight out of the seminary doors and got kicked out because I volunteered to help the cops in tracking down hoods in the hood where I was the pastor in this ghetto church.

The church council didn’t mind that I nabbed the bad guys looking like a lady of the evening who could do it all night. What they didn’t like was that I appeared on the front of the L. A. Times in a hot pink leather miniskirt, strappy sandals that wound up to my knees and a blouse leaving little to the imagination of Great Aunt Tillie, or anyone else. The news story hit the floor running, and little old me was seen and talked about on PBS News Hour, CNN, Fox News, and then YouTube, and then it went viral. As if no one had seen a minister before. Go figure.

People magazine beseeched and besought me for an interview, full four pages of me, but better judgment kicked in. I turned it down after a call from a member of my denomination’s district council put the brakes on that one. Besides I don’t always want to stay and play second fiddle in the church hierarchy. I do have some pride and ambition. I’d like to be known someday as an important voice in ministry, not one of those television evangelists with flapping eyelashes and hair like dear old Marge Simpson. No offense, Marge. It’s not a good look for either of us.

The metaphorical knuckle-wrapping, to me, was worth it. It resulted in the dealing, drugging, and pimping partners in crime who went off to a helping place in another area of California, clogging an overstuffed prison system even more. Not my problem there. I got a letter of commendation from LA’s mayor and my backside booted to Vegas. I wasn’t exactly demoted, but I was no longer a full pastor. These days, if I should burp without saying, “pardonnez-moi,” the council hears about it. In detail. Hence, the youth minister I’m filling in for left exact instructions on the requirements of my professional demeanor so that I wouldn’t lead any teens down a slope where a flashing sign reads: Beware: She’s Crazy and Dangerous.

Back to the man of the midnight hour littering my living room. His grumbling continued. Like waiting out a storm, I sat down next to the huddled mass of manhood whose name isn’t Woe Is Me, but Henry J. Angieski, Ph.D.—my grandfather who just happens to have an alternative personality, one of a classic rocker with the 70s band Slam Dunk. You may have heard of him when he was called Hank A. Yes, that’s Gramps. Although you wouldn’t recognize him. I didn’t.

Gramps is a “let’s get coffee” kind, friends with Sir Paul, Bruce, Mick and a lot more you can name, if you like the older stuff. In all of my thirty-five years, I’d never known him to be defeated, never seen him without a sly smile and a plan to take on the world.

Quick familial footnote: He and Gram couldn’t have children, and they knew it before they married. Gramps told me like this: “Uncle Sam really needed me and thought a tropical Asian trip might help me understand humanity better.”

Translation? It was 1965. He’d dropped out of grad school to find his musical mojo. He was drafted, surprise, surprise, and sent directly to Vietnam where horrible things were happening, like an unpopular and soul-crushing war. Did you wonder how I got into this mix?

Gramps said, “I found the son of my heart there, honey. The kid was always hanging around the barracks. He had red hair like your gorgeous gram and the most intense almond-shaped eyes I’d ever seen. He picked up English like it was nothing, and one day when I handed him a guitar, he started to play chords. He was six or seven, but he didn’t know his birthday and had forgotten his father’s name, if he’d ever known it. Mom died in childbirth, and the bio family shunned him. The other guys in my unit adopted him like a mascot.

“I was finishing my deployment when I got word that I’d been accepted into the music program at the University of Southern California. Your Uncle Sam thought I deserved to return to California because, with this chunk of shrapnel in my knee, I was pretty useless as a foot soldier, and I told everyone the kid was mine.”

That country was in shambles, already invaded by the French, English, and Russians before the US stepped into the mess. So Gramps returned to Gram with a ready-made son whom they adored.

Fast forward ten years. Gram died after a painful battle with cancer, and a couple of months later I came into the world. My father somehow neglected to tell Gramps there was a teenager in his life who was about to birth their baby, and it was a surprise all around when she showed up one day with me in a pink blanket.

Parenthood didn’t rock the Richter scale of life for this young couple. Gramps, once more, manned up, and he became the saving grace for me. The story goes that the twosome, my bio parents, piled their macrobiotic rice, pine nut smoothies, ceremonial drums, unfiltered carrot juice, and love beads inside a rusting, hand-painted purple VW bus, dotted with yellow daisies, and went in search of their bliss. I believe they were about ten years past the real hippies, but that didn’t seem to deter them. The last I heard, when I was sixteen, was that they were in Sedona, selling therapy rocks to tourists. I was happy for them; I had the best grandfather, the coolest Gramps in my school. However, getting a rock in the mail for one’s birthday stunk.

Enough about me. At least for a few minutes—unless it has to do with the reason I wrote this memoir, which is to explain why I ended up a viral sensation on YouTube. Again. Although the in-between stuff scared me silly.

Gramps interrupted my gallop down Memory Lane with a grunt that sounded suspiciously like he was swearing, which I knew he didn’t. Or the normal-ish grandfather I previously claimed didn’t swear.

“Call me Onesimus,” he growled.

“What-a-muss?”

“Get a clue, you’re a preacher. You know this stuff. Always spouting it off as you do all that Bible-belting.” Then he grumbled about how his granddaughter could easily become a pompous prig.

“I’ve never belted a Bible in my life, I’ll thank you.” And I wondered in a tiny spot in my heart if I should look up the definition of prig before I felt insulted.

“Don’t give me that look, girl. I’m immune. Been looking at myself too long for one of your freeze-frame frowns to frazzle me and make me spill my guts.”

“Are you talking Old Testament or New?”

“Look it up, Pastor.”

He never calls me, Pastor. Never before had he even raised his voice to me. “Who are you and what did you do with my grandfather?” I demanded. My now mostly-retired from sex, gals, and rock and roll, and teaching at the university, grandfather lived in the beachy town of Carlsbad, California. “It’s midnight, and my real grandfather is safety tucked in bed right now, not in Vegas, baby.”

We stared at each other, then a flickering two-watt bulb flipped on. “Are you talking about Onesimus, as in the slave the Apostle Paul wrote about?”

“Bing-a-ding ding, girl. Listen, Janey, I’m having a crisis, one that, well, is personal, as private as it can get for a man.”

From the dancing rhinestones embedded on his denim shirt, past the belt buckle the size of Rhode Island, and the boots which had three-inch heels, the man was either auditioning for a low-budget movie or had lost his marbles. My real grandfather was a rock star, wore a lot of black, dragged a guitar everywhere and didn’t dress like a cowboy. He was dependable, had style, sure, and a heart for the next gal and guy. Always.

Okay, there were some ladies of a certain age, groupies if I’m honest, who would have had their way with him, but Gramps was incredibly discreet about that stuff. Then again, I never had a conversation about the birds and the bees with him.

“Oh, personal and private,” I muttered, regretting my decision to have that second Lean Cuisine Mexican Medley. I did not ever, ever, want to discuss my grandfather’s sexual inadequacies or his performance issues, and the souring sensation in my stomach agreed. Big time.

Instead, I blurted, “Men your age are well past that. For Pete’s sake, don’t tell me you’re in Vegas to marry an 18-year-old, half-naked dancer who wears pink feathers that glow in the dark with matching pasties that barely cover her nipples. And that she’s just misunderstood and currently employed at a local strip joint because she’s putting herself through med school.”

He just took off a boot. There was no denial.

“She’s not some chorus babe, Jane. She has to be at least 18 or 19, however. Guess she could be 16 with a fake ID. I never asked.”

***

Excerpt from Jane Won’t Quit by Eva Shaw. Copyright 2026 by Eva Shaw. Reproduced with permission from Eva Shaw. All rights reserved.

From beginning of Chapter One…

Paradise isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Sure, Valerie Corbin knew she and her wife Kristen were supremely fortunate to now reside in the quaint, still-stuck-in-the-1970s town of Hilo on the magnificent Big Island of Hawai‘i—home to lush jungles, fiery volcanoes, black sand beaches, and coral reefs teeming with eye-popping tropical fish.

But at this moment, all she could focus on was the bull terrier-spaniel mix next door barking so loudly that it almost—though not quite—drowned out the whine of the pneumatic tools its owner was using on a jacked-up truck, the parts of which were currently scattered all across his driveway.

Letting loose a few choice words regarding both dog and man, Valerie slammed shut the window above the kitchen sink, then returned to the stove to poke at her potatoes simmering in a pot of water. At the sound of the back door opening, she looked up to see Kristen and her nephew, Sean, come inside from the lānai, Valerie and Kristen’s little white dog, Pua, trotting after them.

“We couldn’t take the racket anymore,” said Kristen, tossing her Outside magazine onto the counter. “Does he ever stop?”

“Who—Akoni or Larry?”

Kristen laughed. “Both, I guess. And yeah, I know the answer: rarely. Especially Akoni, with his constant yowling. Though I gotta say, it seems like Larry’s been working on his vehicles a hell of a lot more of late. And I don’t believe I’ve ever even seen that particular truck before. You think he’s started repairing other people’s vehicles, too?”

“Oh, God, I hope not. Though that would explain the increased frequency of the noise.” Valerie switched off the heat under her potatoes, then turned to Kristen. “I wonder if it’s legal to have a car repair business in this neighborhood. Maybe I should ask at tonight’s meeting if anyone knows.”

“Or maybe you could just talk to your neighbor about it,” put in Sean, who’d taken a seat at the kitchen table and was busy typing something into his phone.

Valerie and Kristen exchanged glances, after which Valerie replied, “Maybe later. But first we should figure out where we stand on the issue.”

Sean set down his phone with a shrug. “So what’s this thing you’re going to tonight, anyway?”

“It’s the monthly meeting for the neighborhood orchid society,” said Valerie, carrying the pot to the sink and dumping the steaming potatoes into a colander. “Shirley invited me—you know, the woman who lives at that house down the street with all those beautiful orchids in her tree ferns? I was admiring them the other day, and after we got talking, she invited me to come along tonight to see if I might be interested in joining. You wanna join me?”

Sean let loose his man bun, held in place by a wooden hair stick, and shook out his dirty-blond locks. “No can do; I’m working tonight at the hospital. It’s my first time in the ER, which should be interesting.”

Sean had come from Arkansas to do a three-month stint as a visiting nurse at the Hilo hospital and was now on his second week at the job—and at Valerie and Kristen’s house, where he’d be staying for the duration of his time on-island. “I didn’t know you were into orchids,” he said in a lazy drawl, pulling his hair back from his face and retying the bun.

“I wasn’t, not till we first got to Hilo. But they’re so amazing and, I dunno . . . other-worldly.”

Star Trek flowers, I call them,” said Kristen, and Valerie nodded.

“And they’re so easy to grow here, so I’m thinking it might be fun to try it myself. Plus, it’d be a great way to get to know some of the folks in the neighborhood a little better.”

“Like Larry?” asked Sean with a grin.

“Ha. I’m not so sure he’s really the orchid type . . .”

***

Excerpt from MURDER, LOCAL STYLE by Leslie Karst. Copyright 2026 by Leslie Karst. Reproduced with permission from Leslie Karst. All rights reserved.