A new month means new releases!

Check out some of the 

great titles coming out this month!

June 7

Victoria Gilbert’s third Booklover’s B&B Mystery, a treat for fans of Mary Daheim and Kate Carlisle, finds owner Charlotte Reed and her former spy neighbor, Ellen Montgomery, pitted against a tea-party poisoner.

Booklover Charlotte is delighted to welcome an eclectic group of guests to Chapters Bed and Breakfast for a book club retreat focused on fairy tales and classic children’s literature. But when one of the guests is poisoned at a Mad Hatter tea party, Charlotte realizes she’s fallen down a rather unpleasant rabbit hole
 
The victim – an opinionated busybody whose jewelry store sold original designs, along with some possibly “hot” merchandise – had plenty of enemies, spurring Charlotte and Ellen to offer their well-honed investigative skills to assist the local police. But as they delve deeper into each of the guest’s stories, they realize all of them had a motive, and the means, to close the book on the unfortunate victim.
 
Enlisting the aid of a few local residents, as well as their new ally, agent Gavin Howard, Charlotte and Ellen vow to reveal the truth, even if the path to any sort of happy ending is strewn with deadly danger.

A fantastic new cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning author Ellen Byron.

Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.
 
Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation – collecting vintage cookbooks – into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a box of donated vintage cookbooks contains the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.
 
The skills Ricki has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy for investigations. But both her business and Bon Vee could wind up as deadstock when Ricki’s past as curator of a billionaire’s first edition collection comes back to haunt her.
 
Will Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware be a success … or a recipe for disaster?

Bookstore owner Tricia Miles tries to open a new chapter in life, but murder mars the pages in the latest entry to Lorna Barrett's New York Times bestselling Booktown series.

Tricia Miles and her sister, Angelica, are the co-presidents of the Stoneham Chamber of Commerce. Things are changing in the booktown, and some merchants would say not for the better. They grumble that too many non-book-related stores are moving into the village, taking up the most visible storefronts on Main Street, diluting the “Booktown” moniker. Of course, the members with other businesses, like the latest, The Bee’s Knees, are fine with other businesses moving in. No matter what side of the argument they're on, all the business owners agree on one thing: Tricia and Angelica are to blame. 
 
Still, it's a pretty typical day in the life of a small-town Chamber of Commerce until one of the disgruntled bookstore owners is killed—Eli Meier from The Inner Light Bookstore, the most vocal of the Chamber complainers. He sold religious and other spiritual books, but also stocked books on wild conspiracy theories and sold incense, crystals, etc. Eli had never been a member of the Chamber until Angelica recently convinced him to join. He hit on her and she, having good taste, turned him down. He hounded (but not stalked) her, and some might think that was a motive for murder. 
 
Stoneham's new police chief is an old friend of Tricia's, but that doesn't mean he's going to go easy on her sister. One might even say that he's going to throw the book at her.

Librarian Lucy’s new historic house comes with a lot of baggage and family secrets. Can she put them to rest or will a killer bring Lucy’s family to their downfall, in the 9th Lighthouse Library mystery.
 
It’s spring in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and Lucy and Connor have moved into their new home at last, a historic cottage on the Nags Head Beach. The house needs a lot of renovations, but they worked hard over the winter to get it ready. Lucy is now happily immersed in her work at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library, planning her wedding, and decorating the house. That is, until a dead body disrupts their peaceful new abode.   
 
The first night Lucy’s alone in the house, with the company of Charles the library cat, she hears sounds. Investigating they see footsteps in the dust of the unfinished living room, and the door to the outside is open. Lucy's reminded that the house is said to be haunted: forty years ago the teenage daughter of the owners fled in the night, and never again stepped foot inside her family home.
 
But the sounds have an all-too-human origin and one evening Lucy and Connor find the dead body of a man they don’t even recognize in their kitchen. They soon realize he has a long-time connection to their house. Lucy's forced to find out what happened all those years ago and why it’s threatening her happiness today.
 
Meanwhile, the Classic Novel Reading Club is reading The House of the Seven Gables by Nathanial Hawthorne, a book about another old house full of secrets. Can Lucy find parallels to her own situation in Hawthorne’s fiction before the killer strikes again?

When a celebrity chef is found dead, Samantha Barnes, the "Cape Cod Foodie", finds her search for the world's best blueberry buckle turning into a search for a killer

The Fourth of July is coming, and for professional food lover Samantha Barnes, it’s all about the picnic. Okay, and the fireworks. And the parade. But mostly the picnic. What could be better than a DIY clambake followed by the best blueberry buckle in the world? Sam has finally found the perfect recipe in the kitchen of Clara Foster, famed cookbook author and retired restaurateur, and she’s thrilled when Clara agrees to a buckle baking lesson. 
 
But when Clara dies in a house fire blamed on carelessness in the kitchen, Sam doesn’t believe it. Unfortunately, her doubts set in motion an investigation pointing to the new owner of Clara’s legendary restaurant—and a cousin of Sam’s harbormaster boyfriend.  So, in between researching the Cape’s best lobster rolls and planning her clambake, Sam needs to find Clara's killer before the fireworks really start....

Perfect for fans of Jane K. Cleland and Ellery Adams, the  second volume in Tracy Gardner’s antiques-themed mystery series finds appraiser Avery Ayers sleuthing a murder in a castle.
 

Thanks to Aunt Midge’s unlikely friendship with Nicholas Pennington, the Duke of Valle Charme, Avery Ayers and her associates at Antiques and Artifacts Appraised head off to their most glamorous assignment yet—cataloguing and appraising the contents of a castle-like mansion on the Hudson River. But regal splendor becomes a backdrop to mayhem when the precious Viktor Petrova timepiece disappears—and housekeeper Suzanne Vick plummets from a parapet to her death.
 
Avery, her dad William, and colleagues Micah Abbott and Sir Robert Lane soon learn that Suzanne’s predecessor also met with an untimely end. Further, the housekeeper’s suspicious demise coincides with Avery’s discovery that many of the Duke’s most priceless heirlooms have been replaced by fakes.
 
Detective Art Smith lends his expertise, but the suspect list encompasses the Duke’s entire retinue—including his family. Could the killer be someone intimately familiar with the Pennington estate, such as caretaker couple Ira and Lynn Hoffman, the Penningtons’ chauffeur Roderick, or even one of the heirs to the Pennington fortune?
 
Then the duke himself is injured in an inexplicable riding accident, and the clock swiftly ticks toward a reckoning with a cold-blooded killer. A criminal mastermind is making a desperate bid for ill-gotten riches…can Avery bring the culprit to justice before her time is up?

 

It’s Labor Day weekend, 1935, and members of the Darling Dahlias—the garden club in little Darling, Alabama—are trying to keep their cool at the end of a sizzling summer. This isn’t easy, though, since there’s a firebug on the loose in Darling. He—or she!—strikes without apparent rhyme or reason, and things have gotten to the point where nobody feels safe. What’s more, a dangerous hurricane is poised to hurl itself in Darling’s direction, while a hurricane of a different sort is making a whirlwind campaign stop: the much-loved-much-hated senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long, whom President Roosevelt calls the “most dangerous man in America.” Add Ophelia Snow’s secret heartthrob, Liz Lacy’s Yankee lover, and the Magnolia Ladies’ garden of red hot pokers, fire-red salvia, and hot pink cosmos, and you have a volatile mix that might just burst into flames at any moment.

Author Susan Wittig Albert has brought us another delightful assortment of richly human characters who face the challenges of the Great Depression with courage and grace. Her books remind us that friends offer the best of themselves to each other, community is what holds us together, and even when life seems too hot to handle, there’s always hope.

June 14

Carolyn Haines's Lady of Bones is the next novel in the series that Kirkus Reviews characterizes as “Stephanie Plum meets the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” featuring sassy Southern private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney.

It’s Halloween season in Mississippi as Sarah Booth and the gang gather to decorate and gush over Tinkie’s new baby, Maylin. Sarah Booth is just about to refresh the cocktails when she hears a knock on the door and opens it to find a woman named Frankie, distraught at the disappearance of her daughter Christa, a young journalist. Christa had been investigating the disappearance of young women in New Orleans over a five-year period—one every year around Halloween. Now Christa herself is missing, and Frankie fears it may be connected to a cult based in the Garden District, called People of Eternity.

People of Eternity are known to have far-reaching connections which Frankie worries may reach as high as law enforcement. Refusing to contact the authorities, she turns to Delaney Detective Agency as her only hope.

Despite initial reservations, Sarah Booth accepts the case, which takes her on a journey to a secret underworld of beguiling cult leaders, witchcraft, and potentially human sacrifice. She’ll have to keep her wits about her if she wants to crack this case…and make it home alive.

Sydney Whitmore, a forensic psychologist, moves to Shipwreck Island and renews her relationship with Ezra Reinhold, a reclusive billionaire who enjoys poking around in cold cases and has the means to hire the best people to find the answers no one else has been able to.

In book 5 in the series, Arden Haynsworth has been kidnapped after being sentenced to death for her part in the death of the kidnapper's daughter Daisy. Arden insists she’s innocent of the crime she’s been accused of and is certain she was set up to take the fall. She’s been allotted five days’ worth of food, water, and air to prove it. If she can prove that she really is innocent of the murder, she'll be set free. If she can’t prove her innocence, she’ll die. The biggest problem is that she’s locked in this room and therefore unable to investigate. She’s offered the chance to be linked via live video feed to anyone she chooses. She chooses Ezra. With only five days to prove the woman’s innocence or watch her perish, the team jumps into action.

Meanwhile, it's Christmas on Shipwreck Island and everyone in Syd's life has gone just a bit Christmas Crazy. Aunt Charley is baking up a storm, Emily is knee deep in preparations for the annual Christmas by the Sea event, Estelle and Esther have parts in the school play, and Logan is helping Ryder with the annual boat parade.

I see some I'm looking forward to. 

How about you?

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