Showing results by author "Connie Shelton" in All Categories

Charlie receives an assignment to drive a teen runaway girl back to her home in Arizona. It’s about a six hour drive each way, and all she has to do is deliver the girl back to her mother, enjoy a night in a nice hotel, turn around and drive back. She’ll be home in plenty of time to bake the Thanksgiving pies with Elsa and settle into the holiday season back in Albuquerque. Or not.

The weather turns to spring, and Charlie faces a pair of puzzles. Against Charlie’s better judgment Ron, her PI partner, takes a cheating-spouse case that turns into a comedy of errors involving a star football player and his wife’s petty vengeance. Meanwhile, Charlie’s neighbor Elsa has a bad feeling about a family up the street. Is it a case of the neighborhood busybody having too much time on her hands, or is there truly something sinister happening with twin teen girls who’ve been left with too much money and not enough supervision?

Talbot Farber, a popular and successful Albuquerque businessman, lost his beloved wife thirteen years ago. There was a fire aboard the ship during their fifth-anniversary cruise. Several people went overboard in the melee; Jenna Farber was the only one whose body was never recovered. Years passed, she was declared legally dead, and Talbot went ahead with his life, raising their young daughter on his own. Now, he tells Charlie and Ron, he has spotted Jenna alive and well in the Denver airport.

Samantha Sweet is back at Sweet's Sweets, turning out her amazing cakes and pastries for the busy holiday season, when Emily Plankhurst, the new young librarian in town, stops in. Emily tells Sam a strange story involving a hidden niche in the library revealed to her in a vision, supposedly, by her dead grandmother. It turns out the hidden space contains a rare painting, The Ghost of Christmas, which was believed to have been destroyed in a fire twenty-five years ago at the luxury home of a hedge fund billionaire.

Charlie and Drake attend a gala event for the helicopter industry, where an old friend of Drake’s presents Charlie with a mystery to solve. One of his company vehicles has gone missing. Charlie is puzzled as to why he didn’t report it to the police or his insurance company, but must admit the fat retainer he pays and the obvious success of his business overrides her initial concerns. When the van is found in an empty field near the small town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, it would seem the case is closed.

Samantha Sweet breaks into houses for a living - all perfectly legal as a caretaker for the USDA. But her real dream is to open her own pastry shop, 'Sweet's Sweets.' Life is a little crazy for Sam right now. At one of her break-in properties, a dying woman insists that she take a small wooden box. Sam doesn't realize that the old woman was known locally as a 'bruja,' a witch, until she begins to feel some strange effects from the box.

Samantha Sweet and her husband Beau have wrapped up a case in Oklahoma and returned to Taos, only to immediately receive surprising news from a friend. There’s been a shakeup in the Taos Sheriff’s Department and suddenly Beau has his old job back. Meanwhile, it’s Thanksgiving week and Sam’s bakery is busier than ever, as they’ve been asked to supply pies for the community Thanksgiving dinner. Plus, there’s a new event—the Harvest Feast. Chefs from around the state will compete to create and share fantastic ways to use holiday leftovers.

It’s Spring Break, and a trio of California college kids head out, not to the beach, but to the mountains of New Mexico, where they plan on a week of snowboarding, beer, and fun. But the instructions to reach their vacation rental are less than precise, and it’s late and snowy when they arrive at Taos Ski Valley. Days later, Casey’s sister is calling the only friend she knows in Taos—Kelly Sweet—hoping to get word to her brother that their mother’s condition has worsened and she doesn’t have long to live. No one has heard from Casey, and she urgently needs to reach him.

Sam is working hard to get her new pastry shop, Sweet's Sweets, open for business. Just when she's really got her hands full with that, she's assigned a new property to take care of as part of her contract with the USDA. The place is a hoarder's delight and Sam is feeling more than a little bit overwhelmed as she begins cleaning with a vengeance. When a blood-soaked garment turns up among some things Sam has dropped off at the thrift shop, Sam recommends that they call the Sheriff's office.

Charlie and Drake are working a helicopter job in rural Maine when a man approaches and asks for their help. At first glance, it seems he's just an old man who needs to get to his son's remote cabin in the woods. But the cabin holds more secrets than Fergus McNab will admit, and it isn't until Charlie returns to Albuquerque that she discovers they may have just aided and abetted a criminal who has escaped the law back home. The secrets get twistier, the more she looks into the 10-year-old case where Rory McNab, facing a life in prison, seemed to vanish from the reach of the law.

There's cash missing from a local charity thrift shop—lots of it. And when it looks like her surrogate grandma might be accused, there's nothing for Charlie to do but take a job there and try to catch the thief from the inside and clear Elsa's name. As she and Elsa begin tracking the missing money, it becomes obvious that the shop is a little goldmine and there are a number of people who could easily be after the money. She's narrowing down the suspects, but when the person who is tops on her list suddenly and mysteriously dies, well it looks like there's a lot more going on.

It’s spring, Easter is fast approaching, and Samantha Sweet has been so busy at the bakery that she hadn’t quite realized that a lot of the yards in Taos are looking a little ragged. It isn’t until she overhears the gossip in Sweet’s Sweets that she realizes the popular neighborhood gardener and handyman, Victor Martinez, has not come around to do his annual spring cleanup and no one has seen or been able to reach him in months.

Is there a serial killer in Taos? It’s the height of the wedding season at Sweet’s Sweets and Sam has all she can do to stay ahead of the rush of bakery orders. Plus, her side job - breaking into houses - isn’t allowing much summer time off either. Not to mention that her mother is pressuring Sam and Beau to set a wedding date. When Sam encounters two older women who then die suddenly, it appears that there may be a serial killer on the loose.

Things are crazy at the bakery, as Sam tries to replicate the magical chocolates that the quirky Romanian chocolatier introduced at Christmas-time. Meanwhile, there are lots of weddings, in addition to her own, and other pastry shop demands during this romantic holiday week. While Sam tries to keep up with it all, another mystery comes her way. Marla Fresques needs to find her missing son. The woman is dying and wants her son home to raise the daughter he left behind.

It's Christmas and a chocolatier shows up at Sweet's Sweets, offering to create a special line of hand-dipped chocolates for Sam's customers. He says he will work for no pay, just to prove himself. But she learns that he has connections to the wooden box that seems to give Sam her mystical powers, and discovers that certain evil people will do just about anything to take it away from her.

Charlie is alone in the office when a teen girl comes in, wanting to hire RJP Investigations to find her mom, who vanished without a trace years ago. The clues were sparse at the time, and the old police file doesn't have much that can help Charlie with the search. The problem for young Cassie is that the grandmother who has raised her is now dying and Cassie's life is about to be upended. All that's holding her together is the belief that her mom is out there somewhere.

A nearly flawless museum robbery, a missing million-dollar necklace, a stalled investigation. For the victim of the crime, the situation calls for desperate measures, and spunky 72-year-old Pen Fitzpatrick isn't going to sit by and do nothing. When the police have a dozen excuses why they can’t solve the crime, Pen does the only thing she can do - gather a group of friends to help catch the crooks and steal back the necklace. They call themselves The Heist Ladies.

Samantha Sweet is back at Sweet's Sweets, her bakery with a magical flair, while husband Beau is now a full-time rancher. When he hires a young cowboy to help out, no one suspects that Danny Flores comes with a lot of baggage until Lila, the girl he left behind, shows up. She says she has romance on her mind, but Danny finds her manipulative and domineering. He changed his number and moved out of state, but she has managed to track him down.

Charlie's brother, Ron, is ready for the happiest day of his life when he will marry longtime girlfriend Victoria Morgan. Charlie will be matron of honor, her husband Drake the best man. But when Charlie stops by the bride's house to pick her up for the ceremony, the place is in disarray, and Victoria is missing. And Ron has no proof of where he was the night before, after he and his fiancée had a terrible argument. Was the fight nothing more than pre-wedding jitters, as Ron claims? Or did the unthinkable happen?

A cryptic message in a fortune cookie sends Charlie again to England to visit her favorite aunt. She's having lunch in a local café when construction workers come upon a human skeleton behind a wall. The police are called to a more urgent case, so Charlie begins sleuthing around on a cold-case crime website, only to discover Aunt Louisa was one of those questioned when the victim disappeared. Can she save her aunt from arrest, or will the real killer come after them both?