Showing results by author "SJ Slagle" in All Categories

Super sleuth Lucy James is hired to find the Colt pistol that may have belonged to Billy the Kid. Hampered by dishonest weapon experts, a pawnshop murder and unusual architecture at a downtown casino, her investigation is rocky at best. A massive snowstorm has blanketed Reno leaving Lucy to slog her way to interviews with uncooperative witnesses. Her father’s abrupt firing from his job as the host of a local children’s television show and the impending marriage between her best friend Cindy Floyd and her detective fiancé Skip Callahan grab chunks of Lucy’s fleeting attention.

Irrepressible. Different. Tenacious. Meet Lucy James, PI in training. Lucy can't seem to finish college and seems stuck in her movie theater job. But she's always been good at figuring out puzzles and a big one drops right in her lap in the shape of an umbrella left behind one rainy night. It turns out something's very wrong at the local art museum and with her best friend, Cindy, and trusty dog, Baskerville, she attempts to find out what.

At the end of WWII, Phyllis Bowden, a young woman in military intelligence, is assigned to the Office of the Military Attache in the American Embassy in Oslo, Norway. Her official tasks include secretarial and intelligence duties, and finding families of lost loved ones. These office duties, as tough as they may be, pale when she’s faced with something that occurs outside the office. Phyllis finds a runaway child in a café bathroom one night.

A strange thing happens at David Wilson's 20th high school reunion: the homecoming queen dies. That was as unexpected as David's arrest for her murder a week later. A popular high school biology teacher, David and his wife Lisa are caught up in a fast-paced life in Phoenix with two jobs and two kids. Drugs, bullying, adultery, and abortion are underlying tensions that fester and drive wedges between family members. With the Wilsons falling apart, his reunion seemed an oasis of calm.

A cowboy lies dead on the trail, shot through the heart with no one around. Detective Dan Alsop must find his killer through a maze of squabbling relatives, disgruntled friends and Hollywood mobsters. The setting is Carson City, Nevada in one of the worst snowstorms in recent history. He finds an unlikely ally in Chloe Ball, cousin to the deceased cowboy. She's in town to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with her husband and his relatives. She becomes more involved in the case than Dan would like, but is helpful in clumsy ways.

London Spies is a book of historical fiction set in London, England, at the end of World War II. Phyllis Bowden, a secretary at the American Embassy, is catapulted into the limelight when the military attaché, Lt. Col. Ronald Lawrence, is arrested for espionage and her boss, the assistant military attaché, assumes the position. The arrest throws suspicion on everyone at the Embassy, particularly Lawrence's secretary whose attempted suicide convinces Phyllis to be more curious about what really happened.

Jaynie Floyd, a celebrated mystery writer, has a book on the New York Times best seller list. It’s wonderful news and her agent wants to send her on a book tour to promote it. However, Jaynie is newly widowed and doesn’t want to go.

Amateur sleuth Lucy James is drawn into the intrigue of a bygone war when she volunteers to help her landlord. The French-speaking parrot she is babysitting for him shrieks out clues that lead Lucy to a mysterious diary and an elderly man with a secret. Her work is compromised when a friend's dog disappears, and then, her own beloved dog, Baskerville, goes missing.

If you love stories set in the Wild West, you'll enjoy the third book of the Sherlock and Me series. Set in Reno, Nevada, and nearby Pyramid Lake on the Paiute Indian Reservation, the story features Lucy James, newly minted PI. She's been hired to find a missing truck driver and a missing horse. The first case takes her into the shadowy world of truck cargo thefts. An experienced truck driver never makes it to his intended destination on his route creating panic for his new fiancé.

An elderly woman dies mysteriously, and her priceless pink diamond disappears. Her granddaughter, Sylvia, wants the jewel found and hires Lucy James, Reno detective. The hunt for the diamond, called the Pink Carbuncle, takes them to Spain and Morocco with varying degrees of success and the bad guys hot on their trail.