Felony Mayhem Press: 138 books

England in the chilly winter of 1902 is captive to a new craze: Mediums and psychics are springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm, and the public is rushing to consult them, thirsty for intimations of the Great Beyond. No surprise, Denton has his doubts: An American Yankee in King Edward's city,...

John Norman Harris’ The Weird World of Wes Beattie, published in 1963, is often called the first Canadian mystery novel. That’s probably stretching things: Let’s just call it a wonderfully funny Canadian mystery novel, with Hair of the Dog its delightful successor. Both feature Sidney Grant,...

In Skeleton Key, readers were introduced to Georgine Wyeth, a widowed young mother in California who stumbled across a body and walked—she emphatically did not fall—into the arms of Todd McKinnon, a pulp novelist living in the community where the murder took place. It’s now a few years later,...

Members of the Greene family keep dying while the pool of possible perpetrators keeps shrinking. Philo Vance – the independently wealthy, staggeringly brilliant, not remotely modest (and did we mention handsome?) amateur sleuth -- uses his detective skills to unravel the murders, though sadly not...

Ethelred and Elsie are an unlikely duo: he’s a deeply mediocre mystery writer, and she’s his deeply nosy, chocolate-chomping agent. And yet they are stuck with one another, if only because their combined sleuthing abilities are much more impressive than anything either one of them can come up...

It's 1901, and with the Boer War raging, England's air is crackling with political intrigue. The rumors are so thick that the newly formed British Secret Service – formed in fact to deal with the rumors – can barely keep a lid on. But it's not South Africa that is on everyone's lips. Rather, it's...

A Drink of Deadly Wine (originally published in 1991) is the first novel in Kate Charles’s acclaimed “Book of Psalms” mystery series set in the Church of England. Gabriel Neville is the model of a modern minister: A scholarly, inspiring speaker, a devoted husband and father…and it doesn’t...

Nothing will poison the present like lies from the past. Sisters Charlotte and Jennifer have a history of “amusing” misunderstandings about attempted suicide. Their granny, Bertha, is wrapped in memories of London in the 1920s, when she and her sister, Jemima, brought new meaning to betrayal....

It’s midsummer in British Columbia, and it’s murderously hot. For Karl Alberg, that becomes more than a metaphor when he discovers a body on the beach, fresh from a fatal plunge into the icy, all-too-appealing waves. Back home in the town of Sechelt, where Alberg is the chief of police, it’s...

In this masterpiece of psychological suspense (second only, perhaps, to Ms. Wright's Edgar-winning The Suspect), the real villain is self-delusion; it inflicts more damage than even the craziest serial-killer. In the case of Emma O'Brea, the delusions concern her marriage: When her husband Charlie...

To Karl Alberg a small town on Canada’s “Sunshine Coast” looks like the perfect place to soothe a psyche that’s been battered by too much big-city police work. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intriguing, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the...

Karl Alberg was a big-city cop before moving to the “Sunshine Coast” of Canada. He solved crimes involving gangsters, druglords, real low-lifes. He can't possibly be stumped by a murder in this sweet little town? But he is. The woman was found propped against a tree, her pretty face scrubbed clean,...

The youngest sprig of a stuffy Toronto family, Wes Beattie is one of life's losers, with a tendency to lie. His fibs have tended to inspire a certain fond exasperation, but now he's gone too far. After narrowly escaping jail for swiping a woman's handbag from a sleazy motel, the hapless Wes is on...

It’s 1950s London. Beautiful Diana Calthrop, last seen breaking hearts in Laura Wilson’s The Innocent Spy as an icily daring MI5 operative in the finest couture, is looking a little tarnished, her famously catastrophic taste in men catching up at last. On the plus side, she has once again bumped...