Bookmarked For Murder , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Dan Andriacco

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118 pages

English

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Pages Gone By is more than just Erin, Ohio's only used book store. It's also a favorite meeting place for writers and readers. And early one morning, it becomes the scene of a murder when a body is found in the romance section. Is the steamy novel, Love's Dark Secret, clutched in the victim's handa clue to the killer? Or is it more significant that the murder weapon was a statue of the iconic Maltese Falcon of film noir fame? As polymath mystery writer Sebastian McCabe and sardonic sidekick Jeff Cody try to unmask the murderer of a friend, they get more help than they need from a talk show psychologist and a group of would-be mystery writers with more imagination than deductive skills. But only they know that one suspect has big secrets to hide - secrets that Mac and Jeff hope don't have to be revealed. An homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction, the witty and suspense Bookmarked for Murder once again shows why novelist and screenwriter Bonnie MacBird called Dan Andriacco "a master of mystery plotting."

Informations

Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	04 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781780928951
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Title Page
Bookmarked for Murder
A Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody Mystery
Dan Andriacco

Publisher Information
Published in 2015 by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2015 Dan Andriacco
The right of Dan Andriacco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK.
Cover design by www.staunch.com

Dedication
This book is dedicated to
Carolmarie Stock
with fond memories of the Class of ’66

Poisoned Pens, Raised Voices
If you’re going to find a body in a bookstore, I think it should happen in the mystery section - not romance. But maybe that’s just me, Thomas Jefferson Cody.
Pages Gone By was the only used-book store in town (unless you count Beans & Books coffee house) and owner Noah Bartlett enjoyed playing host to various groups of literate folks. On the first Tuesday of the month, for example, you could find our good friend Sister Mary Margaret Malone (Triple M to me, and Sister Polly to most people) meeting there with her science-fiction book club. More than a few of the other members are citizens of dubious distinction that she first met in her volunteer job as chaplain for the city jail, but that’s irrelevant to this story.
What matters is that on the fourth Monday in March I put in an appearance at the Poisoned Pens. This was a small circle of aspiring crime and mystery writers who also met monthly at Pages Gone By to critique each others’ work and bolster each others’ spirits. My attendance had been erratic since my marriage three years earlier. But this particular night I made it a point to show up.
“Dunbar Yates is going to be there,” I informed my assistant, Aneliese Pokorny, that morning. “He’s a friend of Mac’s.”
That did not by any means put the New York Times best-selling mystery writer in an exclusive category. My brother-in-law, Sebastian McCabe, maintains a vast network of friends far and wide, especially among his fellow mystery writers.
“In fact,” I added, “he’s staying with Mac for a few days while he does a round of mega-bookstore appearances in Cincinnati and Dayton. So I asked if he could stop by the Poisoned Pens and share some writing wisdom.”
“I know somebody else who’s going to be there,” Popcorn said. Can a short, pleasingly plump woman in her early fifties with dyed blond hair look coy?
She certainly wasn’t talking about herself. Popcorn’s taste in literature runs almost exclusively to the racy romance novels of one Rosamund DeLacey, so mystery writing wouldn’t be on her to-do list.
“I give up. Who?”
“A friend of mine. You’ll see.”
She took a pull on her mug of high-test coffee and left me to ponder that.
Anyone was welcome to show up at a meeting of the Pens, as at most writers’ groups, so I gave her Sphinx act very little brainwork. Probably one of her administrative assistant friends, I thought. The grim Heidi Guildenstern would make a great writer of dark fiction, but she wouldn’t lower herself to go near Mac, her former boss. It must be somebody else. Maybe Francine Cassorla in the classics department - she always wore black fingernail polish and purple eye shadow.
Popcorn and I labor in the communications office of St. Benignus College, where Mac’s day job is as the Lorenzo Smythe Professor of Literature and head of the miniscule Popular Culture Department. In fact, she and I are the communications office, formerly known as the public relations office. The name changed about the time I managed to get Popcorn a promotion from administrative assistant to assistant, with a raise to match the title. In my book that was a bigger magic trick than Mac ever managed, even in his professional days on stage. He lost Heidi as his admin in the process, but they never got along anyway. Win-win!
After trying to imagine a few other campus characters as mystery mavens, I put the guessing game out of my mind and went back to working on a new college brochure with lots of fun facts and pictures of smiling students.
I was smiling myself that evening after a satisfying dinner of chicken cacciatore and mixed vegetables - healthful and delicious. Lynda Teal (Cody), journalist extraordinaire, is no slouch in the cooking department.
“I hate to drag myself away,” I said, standing close to my beloved spouse. Even without heels she’s just a few inches shorter than my six-one, quite curvy, with naturally curly honey-blond hair and a cutely crooked nose. She was wearing a flowered dress and her favorite perfume, the heart-stopping Cleopatra VII. Why wouldn’t I want to stay?
“But you’ll have fun,” she said in her distractingly husky voice. “And I brought home work anyway, so I wouldn’t be very good company.” I gave her a skeptical look. She gave me a kiss, and not the hit-and-run variety. This didn’t make me any more eager to leave.
“I’ll wait up,” she promised.
Pages Gone By, prominently located downtown on High Street, was a sizeable store divided maze-like by themed bookcases running in different directions. The mystery section, for example, was marked off by a silhouette of Sherlock Holmes and - a recent addition - a black statue of the Maltese Falcon.
Near the front of the store, within sight of the counter but on the other side of the room, was an open area with a coffee table and chairs. When I arrived that night, most of the chairs were already occupied.
“Good evening, Jefferson,” Sebastian McCabe greeted me. Too broad of beam for one of the matching chairs, he was sitting in a wider model on wheels. Right next to him was his houseguest, Dunbar Yates, who gave me a “Hi, Jeff.” We’d met briefly in Mac’s office. I would have recognized him anyway from the photo that appears on the back of his Hector Gumm & Beauregard books - a broad, black face with a fringe of goatee not doing much to make up for the lack of hair on top. He was below medium height, say around five-six, with a paunch.
“It turns out that Dunbar knows our host,” Mac rumbled.
“Not exactly,” Yates corrected. “But I knew he looked familiar.”
“From New York,” Noah expounded. “When I worked at Crimes & Punishments Bookshop, Dunbar had a bunch of book signings there.”
An Erin native who had moved back home about four years earlier, Noah Bartlett wasn’t just host to the Poisoned Pens, but a member as well. A handsome man in his late fifties, graying hair always in need of cutting, he was in fact probably the best writer in the group. Years before he’d had several short stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine . He’d often alluded to a novel he was working on, but so far as I know he’d never shown it to the group.
Several of the members were equally shy about sharing their work, promising they’d do it eventually. Connor O’Quinn, a muscular dude with a perennial three-day growth of beard, had never shown the group - or anyone else - a scrap of writing. I had Ashley Crutcher’s word for that. Ashley had brought him into the fold, and I had a strong suspicion that his interest was more in her than in writing mysteries. Whether he’d even read one was up for grabs.
“I’ve been to New York,” Connor commented sotto voce to Ashley in the wake of Noah’s comment, as though he thought that was an accomplishment.
“I could never afford that,” she said wistfully. Her expression brightened. “Though I guess I can now.”
Ashley had slimmed down quite a bit since her estranged husband had been murdered a year and a half earlier, leaving her a six-figure insurance policy. [1] The jeans made that clear. Her face had lost its moon shape and she was paying more attention to her wavy brunette hair than she had in the days when she was married. The young widow appeared to be in the market for a mate. I didn’t think she was serious about Connor O’Quinn, although they were, loosely speaking, a couple. According to Popcorn - who had observed the two engaged in conversation over the bar at Bobbie McGee’s, where Connor worked - Connor was a lot more interested in her than she was in him.
Not so with the other couple in our little group, Roscoe Feldman and Mary Lou Springfield. Their admiration for each other was entirely mutual, and completely transparent. Roscoe had recently retired from teaching English at Bernardin High School. Mary Lou was still hanging on as the school librarian, even though she was well past the age to qualify for full Social Security benefits. They’d been going steady for eighteen or nineteen years. Rumor had it that Roscoe was slow to commit. I asked him once when he was going to pop the question and he said, “What question?”
“There’s only one person missing,” Mo Russert said, pointing to an empty chair on my right. It took me a minute to figure out that she hadn’t miscounted chairs. All the regulars were there. But then I remembered that Popcorn had said a friend of hers would be joining us