October Publications

Monica Ferris makes her hardcover debut with Crewel Yule, the eighth in her cozy series to feature Betsy Devonshire, owner of Crewel World, "a sweet little needlework store in Minnesota." At the annual needlework convention in Nashville, a Milwaukee, Wis., needlework shop owner plunges to her death into the hotel atrium—is it an accident or murder? Despite multiple flashbacks in the book's first third, the story moves along at a sprightly pace, and readers will enjoy the customary detail about needlework that makes this series increasingly popular. Agent, Nancy Yost at Lowenstein-Yost Associates.(Berkley Prime Crime, $19.95 256p ISBN 0-425-19827-8)

Just in time for election season, amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher travels to our nation's capital, where she ends up looking into the suspicious death of a senator's aide, in Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain's Murder, She Wrote: A Vote for Murder, the latest entry in this franchise series based on the popular TV show. A prominent picture of Angela Lansbury as Jessica on the jacket will help cue fans. (NAL, $19.95 288p ISBN 0-451-21303-3)

In Kinki Lullaby, Isaac Adamson's fourth Billy Chaka adventure (after 2003's Dreaming Pachinko), the wisecracking journalist goes to Osaka to accept an award, but the murder of a fellow American takes Billy into some treacherous waters. The exotic world of Japanese puppetry forms the backdrop to the nonstop action. Agent, Dan Hooker at Ashley Grayson Literary Agency.(Dark Alley, $13.95 paper 368p ISBN 0-06-051624-0)

Bitter Lemon Press launches a new crime series devoted to non—English-language writers with Friedrich Glausner's 1936 novel, Thumbprint, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell. What appears to be a routine case—the murder of a traveling salesman in a Swiss forest—proves anything but for cantonal policeman Studer. (Bitter Lemon [www.bitterlemonpress.com], $13.95 paper 200p ISBN 1-904738-00-1)

In Michael Jecks's 17th medieval mystery to feature Sir Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock, The Tolls of Death, the pair investigate the hanging death of a poor Cornish woman that turns out to have far wider implications than initially believed. Two recent U.S. tours have helped build this reliably entertaining British author's fan base. Agent, Jane Conway-Gordon.(Headline [Trafalgar, dist.], $24.95 392p ISBN 0-7553-0174-9)