November Publications

Five Star presents three offbeat books featuring unusual heroines/amateur sleuths: Russ Hall's No Murder Before Its Time, in which 72-year-old retired teacher Esbeth Walters, to the dismay of Texas Ranger Tillis Macrory, looks into a series of grisly murders at a Texas hill-country ranch famed for its vineyard ($25.95 225p ISBN 1-59414-028-6); romance author Cynthia Thomason's Stagestruck: A Jubilee Showboat Mystery, set on the Mississippi River in 1898, in which librarian Gwen Barlow inherits a showboat from her uncle Eli Willoughby, but soon finds herself in trouble when Eli's accidental death in a theater mishap proves otherwise ($25.95 241p -078-2); and The Perils of Marie Louise, a contemporary fairy tale by DeLoris Stanton Forbes (One Man Died on Base), in which beautiful Mary Louise on her 13th birthday dons the Snodgrass Girdle, a gift from Grandmere, matriarch of the Snodgrass clan; bizarre and fatal consequences soon follow ($25.95 232p -083-9).

Severn House rolls out two novels from British crime veterans: Stella Whitelaw's Hide and Die, her fourth Jordan Lacey caper, in which the fearless PI pursues a paternity dispute, a cross-dressing mystery and an unsolved 10-year-old murder case ($26.99 256p ISBN 0-7278-5893-9); and Gerald Hammond's Down the Garden Path, in which May Forsyth finds both romance and murder at her new gardening job at Cannaluke House ($25.99 224p -5951-X).