Phyllis Whitney

Mystery Writers of America grand master Phyllis A. Whitney- author of more than 70 best sellers- presides over a salon of the wittiest writers of mystery in this fifth sparkling entry in the Malice Domestic series. The contributors to this collection deliver skillfully plotted crime writing that is a credit to the Agatha Christie tradition. Short stories include: • " A Parrot Is Forever" ...

In search of solitude in the wake of her son's tragic death, recently divorced physical therapist Kelsey Stewart accepts an invitation to stay at her Aunt Elaine's seaside inn in Carmel, California. No sooner does Kelsey arrive than she becomes moved by another tragedy: On a bright sunny day, local boy Jody Hammond fell from the Point Lobos cliff into the pounding waves of the Pacific and was left with a devastating brain injury. He now stares into...

A movie star's suicide draws a young woman into the deadly shadows of a Hollywood scandal. More than fifty years ago, Victoria Frazer and Roger Brandt were the most popular stars of the silver screen-until a notorious and tragic love affair on set in the Appalachians destroyed their lives. It was there, at the foot of Rumbling Bald Mountain in Lake Lure, North Carolina, where Victoria drowned herself, and where Roger would remain-drifting into obscurity...

A psychic investigates a mysterious disappearance high in the Appalachian. It's a legacy Christy Loren never wanted. The unwitting inheritor of her mother's psychic gifts, the Long Island librarian assists in police investigations, but they've become too hard for her to bear. Too many victims. Too many shallow graves. So she's fled to the peaceful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to stay with her aunt Nona. But Christy is soon drawn back into...

Family secrets are locked away at the intimidating Virginia estate of a prima ballerina in this suspenseful tale from a New York Times-bestselling author. Susan Prentice is a young nurse at a crossroads. She's broken off an engagement, the father who raised her has just died, and now she's leaving the western shores behind for a trip to her family's home on Virginia's Northern Neck-where she saw her mother fall to her death twenty-five years ago....

In nineteenth-century New England, a desperate young woman's only refuge becomes an inescapable trap. It was fitting that Miranda Heath's first glimpse of the forbidding home at Bascomb's Point was in the fury of a thunderstorm. Despite her late father's caution to steer clear of his friend Obadiah Bascomb's New England mansion, Miranda, destitute as she was, had no choice but to accept the old captain's charitable request. Besides, her father and...

A woman heads to Palm Springs to stay with her great-aunt, a Hollywood star with a mysterious past, in this romantic suspense novel by an Edgar Award winner. Ever since New York journalist Carol Hamilton was a young girl, her great-aunt Monica Arlen has been for her the stuff of glittering, starry-eyed fantasy. Now, the reclusive movie star offers Carol an escape of another kind. In flight with her son from an abusive marriage, she's come to Monica's...

The wife of a scientist fights for her marriage-and her husband's sanity-in postwar Japan. When Jerome Talbot's brilliant career as an atomic physicist leads him once again to Japan, his wife, Marcia, knows it means yet another long separation, but she hopes to reunite with him soon. Confidently awaiting word to join him, she is blindsided when she receives a letter demanding divorce. Stunned and hurt, she leaves their home in Hawaii to confront Jerome...

An island off the Georgia coast holds the memory of a broken heart and the secrets of a woman's past. It's been years since Lacey Ames last saw Hampton Island, where she grew up amid the sandy marshes with her childhood sweetheart, Giles Severn, and her cousin Elise-and where Elise had stolen the man Lacey loved. Lacey never forgot the hurt and betrayal she once suffered at Giles's grand family home of Sea Oaks, but a curious and compelling summons...

After the Civil War, a young Confederate bride finds herself living in the shadow of her husband's first love. Having lost her fiancé in battle, Lora Blair knew it was the heartache of war, not true love, that drew her to Union soldier Wade Taylor, a grieving widower who still mourned his late wife, Virginia. Married quickly in the ravished little Southern border town where Lora was born, they headed back North to Wade's Staten Island mansion,...