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Curl up with a Cozy Mystery Today!
Agatha Christie in front of the TARDIS, as played by Fenella Woolgar in the Dr Who episode The Unicorn and The Wasp.
Fall is the best time to enter the M&M Book Awards
You have until September 30th to share your Novel with us and enter the 2024 CIBAs!
This Division is dedicated to one of the most Well-known Mystery authors, Dame Agatha Christie. Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and so much more.
WWI Nurse, Writer, Playwright (and record holder of longest running Stage Play, The Mousetrap which opened in 1952), and Archaeologist, the latter of which contributed greatly to her novels.
When she wasn’t busy writing, She spent quite a good amount of her life working on excavations in Egypt and Iraq with her 2nd Husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.
But enough about Christie. The Hall of Fame features the Grand Prize Winners of the Mystery and Mayhem Award who we are proud to have in the Chanticleer Family!
A Haunting at Linley: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel
By Michelle Cox
In this seventh book of the series, Clive and Henrietta return to England to find Castle Linley in financial ruin. When Clive’s cousin, Wallace, invites an estate agent in to assess the home’s value, the agent is later found poisoned, throwing all of the Castle’s guests into suspicion. Clive and Henrietta are soon drawn into an investigation, which is slowed by an incompetent local inspector and several unexplained phenomena—the cause of which many, especially the frail Lady Linley, believe to be the workings of the ghost of a hanged maid.
Meanwhile, Gunther and Elsie have begun life on a farm in Omaha. Circumstances are difficult, but they are content—until Oldrich Exely appears, proposing an option Elsie finds difficult to ignore. Melody Merriweather, still masquerading as a nun to aid Elsie’s escape, likewise finds it difficult to ignore a letter with tragic news from home, while Julia, on the other hand, receives a very different sort of letter from Glenn Forbes.
Back in England, Clive is called away to London on suspicious business, leaving Henrietta to carry on with the investigation alone. When she is mysteriously locked in the study one night, however, things take on a more deadly, supernatural feel, leaving her to fear that Lady Linley’s “ghost” might just be real after all…
A Spying Eye: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel
By Michelle Cox
Brooding Château du Freudeneck, just outside Strasbourg, France has villains in the drawing rooms, stolen art hidden in the cellars, and bats in the belfry – all the best elements for a 19th-century Gothic mystery.
However, in Michelle Cox’s novel, A Spying Eye it’s the 20th century. The Great War is passed, but the next war already looms on the horizon. The people of Strasbourg feel the growing conflict sharply, at the heart of Alsace-Lorraine, a fertile region that has been contested between France and Germany since time immemorial.
Which means those bats are in the unfortunate head of the elderly Baron Von Harmon, the current lord and master (as much as he’s still able to be, at least) of the Chateau, while the stolen art is pursued by both the villainous Nazis and the only slightly-less villainous agents of Britain’s MI5.
Ophelia’s Room
By Michael Scott Garvin
Ophelia’s Room by Michael Scott Garvin begins with a bang – and a child’s whimper.
A frantic, distraught father pounds on a bolted chapel door in a small country hospital…. A tiny, two-day-old infant cries in peril…. A deranged grandfather sees demons in every shadowy corner.
The opening scene read like something out of a young parent’s nightmare. Will their child be healthy? Will they grow up to be successful? Will the child be safe in their grandparents’ arms? Questions that any new mother and father ask themselves. In Garvin’s Ophelia’s Room, the answers are terrifying.
The Discovery
By Patrick M. Garry
Patrick M. Garry’s The Discovery encompasses a narrative that traverses a family legal case jigsaw puzzle toward a discovery of self by exploring the ghost of ancient regrets, basic human desires, and questions of faith.
Frank Horgan, a former lawyer at one of Minneapolis’ largest firms, now practices small-case litigation in the little community of Basswood Hills. Frank, a victim of his own follies, has one more chance to restore his career to its former glory. But not before a huge legal matter comes knocking on his door at his father’s diner. This case kicks off the legal drama, bringing in several main and secondary characters to play their parts in the ultimate discovery of buried contentedness and eventually a scandal that breaks into the national newspaper.
Meanwhile, Frank comes upon the case of the most prominent McCorkle family in Basswood Hills.
Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery
By Vee Kumari
A complex murder mystery always requires a little spice. In Dharma, A Rekha Rao Mystery, that extra seasoning is provided by the casting of an Indian American woman as the amateur sleuth, despite her realistic fears for her personal safety.
Professor Rekha Rao is no Bollywood Mighty Girl. She’s a whip-smart American-born 32-year-old college instructor who must deal with her own PTSD after the murder of her father and her unstoppable passion for releasing the man wrongly convicted of her father’s slaying. That obsession is the reason Rekha was dismissed from her old teaching position. The scene is set for deep, personal involvement in the murder of a colleague, a fellow professor who is killed. And a rare, centuries-old statue excavated from an archeological dig in India is the murder weapon.
A Promise Given
By Michelle Cox
With a much-anticipated wedding is in the works, but family complications and entanglements threaten the celebration, when is love A Promise Given, and when is it a compromise taken?
Amidst tribulations of friends and family, the smart and beautiful Henrietta, and the intense Inspector Clive Howard say, “I do.” Now the loving couple will learn how to be Mr. and Mrs. Howard on their honeymoon in England with his relatives at Castle Linley, where intrigue and mystery await their arrival.
Now that you’re set on your next reads, what are you waiting for? The only way to join this amazing list of Hearten Winners is to Enter Today!
Those who submit and advance will have the chance to win the Overall Grand Prize of the CIBAs and $1000!
You know you want it…
Are you a Chanticleer Author who has some good news to share? Let us know! We’re always looking for a reason to crow about Chanticleerians! Reach out with your news to info@ChantiReviews.com
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