Holiday Read

Meg Miller is making her crime-solving debut in a holiday story with unpredictable twists and turns. She's a sixty-something widow, retired librarian, community volunteer, and technologically challenged. She could be my friend.

Her first adventure in the Meg Miller Cozy Mystery Series takes place when she's recruited to chair the annual Dickens Historical Homes Tour. Flustered because she's disposed of her hooped petticoat, Meg visits Darrow House before the tour to pick up a spare costume piece. She's alone in the house, noticing a few irregularities and finding a valuable piece of jewelry she'd thought was lost forever. None of that deters her from climbing the impressive staircase to the second floor, where her weekend plans will be altered, making her the subject of several interviews regarding a dead body.

Meg's initial tenacity is to clear her own name and any suspicion about her motivation, but she begins to have an intuition about the victim's connection to the local mega-church. Meg attended high school with the charismatic church leaders, and she knows their history.

With the help of her best friend, Jean, and the support of her daughter, Dorie, Meg is determined to assist Detective Penny Crawford in unraveling the questions about the deceased woman's abnormal family. And there's plenty of dysfunction. Socialite, Lena Hillard's husband, Brian, already has one deceased wife, leaving him with two teenage daughters to raise. Older now, those young women show no sadness about their stepmother's death, or her missing Cadillac.

It's a little bit of Agatha Christie meets Grace and Frankie with LaRue, the cat, a splash of paranormal, a holiday setting full of decorations and food, and a couple of quirky characters. Looking to start a quick read to put you in the mood for the season? A Dickens of a Crime, a Meg Miller Cozy Mystery, can kick off the series and the season. I'm just looking to tell a story and get some reviews. Hope you enjoy the book and your holidays.

For a moving novel set in the Thanksgiving season, check out Opal's Story. A murder/suicide in 1948 changes a prominent family's lives forever. There's redemption, forgiveness, and an unlikely hero. In the Heartbeats: Heartbeat at My Feet and Heartbeat Too, a young girl learns to live with her mother's dysfunction and accept loss while coming of age in a small town. Happy holiday season, hope your story is a good one.