Bird Mystery

It's scrap day on the ranch, and Hank is looking forward to a delicious feast of juicy, fatty bacon scraps. But just as Little Alfred is doling out the goods, two very unusual-looking creatures fly overhead, and what was promising to be a glorious day takes a dramatic turn for the worse. Suddenly the scraps have vanished, and the Head of Ranch Security finds himself dealing with an invasion by a couple of ancient dinosaur birds! Can Hank get to the bottom of this latest mystery...before it's too late?

In a small village in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, a reclusive older woman is found strangled outside her home. Roméo Leduc, chief inspector for homicide, is one day away from his first vacation in years but reluctantly answers the call on the case. Marie Russell lives in the same small community. She did not know her elderly neighbor, and she does not expect to become embroiled in solving her murder. But when a startling new clue emerges, Marie becomes an inadvertent detective.

The Statfire Breeze steams its way north toward the Gulf of Alaska, buffeted by crisp sea winds blowing down from the Arctic. Those on board are seeking peace, relaxation, adventure, escape. But there is no escape here in this place of unspoiled natural majesty. Because terror strolls the decks even in the brilliant light of day...and death is a conspicuous, unwelcome passenger. And a former Seattle policeman, a damaged homicide detective who has come to heal from fresh, stinging wounds...

When Betsy Stevenson signed up for the writer’s conference, she thought she’d see her Houston friends and learn more about the craft of writing. However, rain, canceled flights, and a chance meeting with Dillon McCloud (a mystery writer and keynote speaker) turns her life into a back-to-back adventure. And the mayhem has to include Rose Wilford, Betsy’s bestest friend in all the world. Especially since she ‘happens’ to show up at the writer’s conference, and she isn’t a writer. While she’s there – Rosie invites Dillon to join them on a girl’s trip in her RV. The famous ...

Sang Sorenson’s father abandoned her and her sister, leaving them to fend for themselves for months. He’s returned, and finds Sang is missing. He demands she return. Right now. Will he call the police if she doesn’t? Her Academy team doesn’t want to risk losing her ghost status and she doesn’t want to put them in danger, so she reluctantly returns home, but is comforted that she will still be monitored by them.

She left the big city police force to start life over as a private investigator in a small mountain town, where things prove to be a little too quiet...until she lands in jail next to a drunk hippie with a missing son and ends up tied to a tree in the forest.

Nell Sweeney has led an ordinary life. Every day, she walks to and from the hospital where she works as a nurse, believing that no harm can befall her. Until one day she is taken. Because someone out there has a secret. Someone out there has been watching Nell—and they’ve been watching others like her, too. Nell is the unlucky one—she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if she isn’t found soon, someone will make sure that she isn’t the last woman to be taken.

When a bird flu pandemic reaches the picturesque yet uncanny island Gotland, panic spreads among the inhabitants who are frantic for an elusive cure. As the community becomes more desperate, the hunt for scapegoats begins. Extremist and anti-immigrant groups gain ground while nurse Sandra Hägg makes a gruesome discovery at the health clinic where she works — a discovery that will cost her life. Soon Detective Inspector Maria Wern is handpicked to investigate the case.

The Last Layover is a fiction novel based on real places and potential scenarios where an out of control government pushes America to the brink of financial and social collapse. This vulnerable state allows the unthinkable to happen, causing the comfort, security, and conveniences of our modern first world society to quickly come to an end.

In an untouched corner of Craynebrook, the lifeless body of a local farmer is found, his blood mingling with the mud of Blackbird Farm. For Detective Inspector Matthew Stannard, still nursing wounds from a brutal assault, this grisly scene marks the beginning of an investigation unlike any he’s worked on before.

When Hani, an Egyptian diplomat under Akhenaten, is sent to investigate the murder of a useful bandit leader in Syria, he encounters corruption, tangled relationships, and yet more murder. His investigation is complicated by the new king’s religious reforms, which have struck Hani’s own family to the core.

Professor Edwin McGorgol, the famous crime detecting sandpiper, is on vacation at the luxurious Guano Island Hotel with his friend, George Hockney, a sweet though dimwitted seagull, when the hotel is struck by a crime wave. A cat burglar is stealing the jewels of the hotel's guests, and the only bird with the guts and the smarts to stop him is Professor McGorgol.

Bryan Hale is a damaged man. The stresses of combat flying in England's summer skies during the Battle of Britain, and night-fighting in the icy darkness of the Blitz, together with the loss of friends and a shattered heart, have left him broken and grounded. Fortress Malta, and the unrelenting Nazi siege that aims to grind it away, will be the furnace that forges him anew.

Laurel Nightingale wants to start again. However, after discovering a dead body shortly after arriving in the tight-knit community, she wonders if village life is as wholesome as she first thought. . . Local police are convinced the death was accidental, but Laurel suspects murder, and enlists new friend Maggie to join her quest in uncovering the truth. When a second body is found, Laurel ruffles feathers by pointing the finger at one of the locals. But, when her accusation backfires, she's left alienated and afraid.

Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning.

Five fun cozy mystery books with pet-sitter Polly Parrett.

When Professor Wilson Bledsoe is brutally murdered, two loathsome white supremacists seem like the obvious culprits. But Bledsoe's younger brother Sterling, an FBI agent in New York, has other ideas. A look around Wilson's lab and interviews with his students, his fellow professors, and the college's president pique Sterling's curiosity about Wilson's nearly-completed project on the mysterious death of hundreds of local blackbirds.

Young Tom French was found dead, lying in a marsh on the Norfolk coast, with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck. One of the best birders in England, Tom had put the village of Rushy on the birdwatching map. Everyone liked him. Or did they? George Palmer-Jones, an elderly birdwatcher who decided quietly to look into the brutal crime, discovered mixed feelings aplenty. Still, he remained baffled by a deed that could have been motivated by thwarted love, pure envy, or something else altogether.

Acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year since boyhood to a beloved patch of western Maine woods. What is the biology in humans of this deep-in-the-bones pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing? Heinrich explores the fascinating science chipping away at the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home if they are displaced from it; and more.

Jack Terrington, the nation's most prolific serial killer, returns to the scene of his first murders, a small town he'd escaped only by dumb luck. Jack Terrington has an aptitude for getting away with murder; he’s been doing it for twenty years. He’s a drifter, leaving a trail of fear and death from coast to coast. And though he’s always avoided capture, he’s haunted by the memory of Liberty, Virginia—Jack had escaped capture only by dumb luck. And that’s always bothered him. Now, before he retires for good, he’s returning to the small town to settle the score. Meanwhile, ...