Böcker av Carolyn Summer Quinn

Belinda and Jonathan O'Malley always wanted a sibling for their daughter, Holly. When the opportunity arose in 1975 to adopt two Vietnamese orphan girls from Operation Babylift, they were overjoyed to welcome Liana and Bonnie into their home. Exuberant Bonnie is delighted to finally find herself with a family but Liana is a lot more reticent. When a strange Vietnamese man Belinda doesn't know takes such an interest in Liana that he tracks her to the O'Malley's Indiana hometown, Belinda has to wonder what is going on. The stakes are raised higher when their new daughter, who isn't forthcoming about her past, goes missing not long after this odd guy shows up. Who is this man? What does he want with her child? And what, for that matter, went on with eight-year-old Liana, back in Vietnam, to have sparked this whole dilemma in the first place? A riveting mystery about a well-intentioned American family and their adopted child of secrets.

What's a nice down-to-earth girl from Brooklyn doing in a place like Hollywood?It's 1964, and Katie Hathaway, almost but not quite twenty-one, has been living in sunny Southern California with her television star aunt and uncle, and their various children and staff, since her parents died ten years earlier. Her uncle is decent, but his wife, the aunt, is a vainglorious pain in the rump. Jealous Aunt Floriana picks a fight with her daughter Clover and causes the girl to flee the house in a hysterical huff. When Clover doesn't return, Katie fears the worst. A day later Clover is found murdered in a crime that doesn't make any initial sense.On top of all else, Katie works as an assistant to costume designer Eva Zeitoune at Grand Manor Studios. Eva, late of Berlin, left Germany with three colleagues right before the start of the Second World War. As Katie tries to figure out Clover's murder, Eva recognizes the notorious Nazi who tormented her family taking a stroll on Van Nuys Boulevard, and it turns out he's arrived with a scheme for revenge. What exactly are we all living under, Katie wonders - some kind of a Hollywood backlash moon?

He's a high school English and Theater teacher who always secretly wanted to be a cop. So when Monty Farraday is summoned, for reasons unknown, to meet with principal Reginald Brandenburg prior to the start of the school year during the unpredictable summer of 1974, and suddenly finds himself in the middle of the biggest murder mystery to ever hit the town of Lake Covington, Colorado, he wants to solve it. It's bad enough that Monty and his daughter Jessica are the ones to find the principal's dead body, but the next thing they hear is that a beloved teacher, Naomi Sutherland, was done in a day earlier as well. Why were two school staff members killed within two days? Who could possibly be behind this? And what is the significance of the silver rose charm that Jessica found near the murder scene? Figuring out the solution to the two murders may initially seem impossible, but look out, Lake Covington, because Monty's on the case! A CHARM WITHOUT A CHAIN is the Winner of a Literary Titan Gold Book Award, Winner of the Firebird International Book Awards in the Cozy Mystery category, and also won an Honorable Mention in the 2024 Reader Ready Book Awards. It's an intriguing mystery!

In the 1920s, song-and-dance man August La May, formerly known as Avram Landenberg of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, thought he was living a grand life on the Orpheum Circuit in vaudeville, traveling the country with his gal Violetta and daughters April and Florabelle. Even after Violetta deserts the act and breaks his heart, he continues the act with his children, still bringing down the house while billed as "The Three La Mays." But four years after Violetta left, all might not be well. August is sure he sees Violetta on the theater ticket line in Chicago. Later that day, seven-year-old Florabelle goes missing on the way to the stage from her dressing room. Is this a coincidence? Has Violetta really returned for only one of her daughters, or has someone else in vaudeville taken the talented child? Who, among the many rather irregular folks in show business, might have done this? August and his other daughter, savvy little April, keep touring the theaters of America, determined to find out. Where then, in the space of the entire country, could Florabelle possibly be?

Jasmine works for a talent agent so tyrannical she's looking forward to the day she can quit when she enters the office and finds him dead on the floor. That narcissistic agent is one of the most hated characters on Broadway, and it's not really a surprise that he finally got stabbed in the back. Already in shock, young Jasmine is furuther astonished to find out that the boss she couldn't abide left her the agency, and everything else he owned, in his latest, newly revised will. The co-workers he bypassed are furious, the actors he worked with are not really sorry he's dead, and the police are stumped. In the menacing theatrical environment that exists beneath the veneer of a glamorous industry, where so many people are not who they pretend to be, can Jasmine find out whodunit?