A retired professor finds that an amateur sleuth’s work is never done, even on an Australian holiday in this cozy mystery with “a dandy plot” (Publishers Weekly). Andrew Basnett takes a break from his little English village to spend Christmas in the small Australia city of Adelaide. Visiting Tony, an old colleague with a newish wife, Basnett soon learns that a cloud hangs over the marriage. Jan, Tony’s bride, is widely believed to have murdered her first husband—a fact that is giving Tony second thoughts. Things don’t get any more comfortable when, at a family dinner, one of the guests is killed with a chunk of the same crystal that had been Jan’s alleged murder weapon. And Jan herself has disappeared. Now it’s up to Professor Basnett to make the truth crystal clear.

Can this undercover agent save the woman he loves—or is her heart as counterfeit as the money he's been sent to track down? After all that Grandfather has sacrificed to raise her, Theresa Plane owes it to him to save the family name—and that means clearing their debt with creditors before she marries Edward Greystone. But when one of the creditors' threats leads her to stumble across a midnight meeting, she discovers that the money he owes isn't all Grandfather was hiding. And the secrets he kept have now trapped Theresa in a life-threatening fight for her home—and the truth. After months of undercover work, Secret Service operative Broderick Cosgrove is finally about to uncover the identity of the leader of a notorious counterfeiting ring. That moment of triumph turns to horror, however, when he finds undeniable proof that his former fiance is connected. Can he really believe the woman he loved is a willing participant? Protecting Theresa and proving her innocence may destroy his career—but that's better than failing her twice in one lifetime. They must form a partnership, tentative though it is. But there's no question they're both still keeping secrets—and that lack of trust, along with the dangerous criminals out for their blood, threatens their hearts, their faith, and their very survival. Combining rich history, danger, suspense, and romance, Crystal Caudill's debut novel launches this new historical series with a bang. Fans of Elizabeth Camden, Michelle Griep, and Joanna Davidson Politano will be thrilled to find another author to follow!

A retired botanist comes to stay in a charming English village, where murder and blackmail disturb the bucolic peace in this mystery series debut. No longer on the sprightly side of seventy, Professor Andrew Basnett is looking forward to retirement and finally digging into the biography he plans to write about an obscure seventeenth century botanist. While his flat in town is renovated, he settles into a little village in Oxfordshire where he’s borrowed his nephew’s cottage. It sounds perfectly pleasant, even with the village murderess living right up the road. Basnett’s nephew informs him that Pauline Hewison’s case never came to trial because she had the perfect alibi. Not entirely comforted, Basnett is more unnerved when a blizzard knocks out the power and provides a dark, snowy night just like the one six years ago when someone shot Charles Hewison through the head. It doesn’t help that there’s been another murder and that Pauline, once again, has motive to spare.

A beautiful killer, a cop determined to unravel an enigmatic trail of bloody butchery, a young medium fleeing her past, troubled dreams of murder. A perverse game of life and death unfolds between the hunter and the hunted, murderer and detective, night and day, where the female of the species proves as daringly evil as Hannibal Lecter, giving 'Femme Fatale' a whole new meaning.