Mindful Of Murder

Meet Helen Thorpe. She’s smart, preternaturally calm, deeply insightful and a freshly trained butler. On the day she is supposed to start her career as an unusually equanimous domestic professional serving one of the wealthiest families in the world, she is called back to a spiritual retreat where she used to work, the Yatra Institute, on one of British Columbia’s gulf islands. The owner of the lodge, Helen’s former employer Edna, has died while on a three-month silent self-retreat, leaving Helen instructions to settle her affairs. But Edna’s will is more detailed than most, and getting things in order means Helen must run the retreat for a select group to determine which of Edna’s relatives will inherit the institute. Helen’s classmates, newly minted butlers themselves, decide they can’t let her go it alone and arrive to help Helen pull things off. After all, is there anything three butlers can’t handle? As Helen carries out the will’s instructions, she begins to think that someone had reason to want Edna dead. A reluctantly suspicious investigator, Helen and her band of butlers find themselves caught up in the mystery.

When a homeless boy living at the youth shelter run by a Buddhist monastery turns up dead, the abbot recruits Father Ananda, a monk and former police officer, to find out why. He discovers that all is not well at this urban monastery in the heart of Bangkok. Together with his dogged assistant, an orphaned boy named Jak, Father Ananda uncovers a startling series of clues that eventually expose the motivation behind the crime and lead him to the murderers. "Mindfulness and Murder" is the first in the Father Ananda murder-mystery series. Praise for the Father Ananda series: "A gripping read peppered with fascinating insights into the day to day life of a Buddhist monk. Nick Wilgus's Mindfulness and Murder puts a new spin on an old genre." -- UNTAMED TRAVEL MAGAZINE "Wilgus ... has a good fix on temple boys, the precepts of Buddhism, the jaundiced eye with which the populace regards the constulabary, the vendors, the weather, the air pollution." -- BANGKOK POST

Butler-detective Helen Thorpe returns to help a wannabe influencer get her life in order—and solve the murders of her fellow content creators—in this hilarious sequel to Mindful of Murder by bestselling author Susan Juby When Buddhist butler Helen Thorpe is loaned out to help Cartier Hightower get her life in order, Helen finds herself working for a young woman entirely unbound by the fetters of good taste or sound judgment. One of Cartier’s fellow content creators has recently died in a strange accident. Soon after Helen arrives, another is killed in an equally bizarre way. Cartier begins to drag Helen around on the influencer circuit, where neither of them is particularly welcome. Then comes the terrible incident at the EDM nightclub that turns Cartier into a global pariah, at least according to social media. Helen hopes a period of simplicity and reflection and an internet detox will help Cartier find her true nature and maybe acquire some social graces. But Helen’s job gets much harder when Cartier’s friends show up at the lavish ranch where Cartier and Helen have retreated. Soon, Helen finds herself trying to avoid becoming Instafamous while bringing some peace to a girl who very much needs it. This task turns out to be even more impossible when it becomes clear that they have been followed to Weeping Creek Ranch by a murderer.

Woefield Farm is a sprawling thirty acres of scrub land, complete with dilapidated buildings and one half-sheared, lonely sheep named Bertie. It’s “run”—in the loosest possible sense of the word—by Prudence Burns, an energetic, well-intentioned twenty-something New Yorker full of back-to-the-land ideals, but without an iota of related skills or experience. Prudence, who inherited the farm from her uncle, soon discovers that the bank is about to foreclose on Woefield Farm, which means that she has to turn things around, fast. But fear not! She’ll be assisted by Earl, a spry seventy-something, banjo-playing foreman with a distrust of newfangled ideas and a substantial family secret; Seth, the alcoholic, celebrity-blogging boy-next-door who hasn’t left the house since a scandal with his high school drama teacher; and Sara Spratt, a highly organized eleven-year-old looking for a home for her prize-winning chickens, including one particularly randy fellow soon to be christened Alec Baldwin. Full of off-beat charm and characters you won’t soon forget, The Woefield Poultry Collective is a heartwarming novel about learning how to take on a challenge, facing your fears and finding friendship in the most unlikely of places.

Look for Courtney Summer's groundbreaking new thriller, I'm the Girl, September 13th 2022 "Sadie: a novel for readers of any age, and a character as indelible as a scar. Flat-out dazzling." —A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window A New York Times bestseller! An Edgar Award Winner! Appearing on over 30 Best Book of 2018 lists including The Boston Globe, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Globe and Mail, Good Morning America, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and more! A YALSA Top 10 Quick Pick 4 Starred Reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly! "Sadie: a novel for readers of any age, and a character as indelible as a scar. Flat-out dazzling." —A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window "Sadie is an electrifying, high-stakes road trip. Clear your schedule. You're not going anywhere until you've reached the end." —Stephanie Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of There's Someone Inside Your House and Anna and the French Kiss "A haunting, gut-wrenching, and relentlessly compelling read." —Veronica Roth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Carve the Mark and the Divergent series A missing girl on a journey of revenge. A Serial—like podcast following the clues she's left behind. And an ending you won't be able to stop talking about. “Today, WNRK is launching the first episode of our new serialized podcast, The Girls, created and hosted by West McCray.” When popular radio personality West McCray receives a desperate phone call from a stranger imploring him to find nineteen-year-old runaway Sadie Hunter, he’s not convinced there’s a story there; girls go missing all the time. But when it’s revealed that Sadie fled home after the brutal murder of her little sister, Mattie, West travels to the small town of Cold Creek, Colorado, to uncover what happened. Sadie has no idea that her journey to avenge her sister will soon become the subject of a blockbuster podcast. Armed with a switchblade, Sadie follows meager clues hoping they’ll lead to the man who took Mattie’s life, because she’s determined to make him pay with his own. But as West traces her path to the darkest, most dangerous corners of big cities and small towns, a deeply unsettling mystery begins to unfold—one that’s bigger than them both. Can he find Sadie before it’s too late? Alternating between Sadie’s unflinching voice as she hunts the killer and the podcast transcripts tracking the clues she’s left behind, Sadie is a breathless thriller about the lengths we go to protect the ones we love and the high price we pay when we can’t. It will haunt you long after you reach the final page.

In 1931, Emily Thornhill, one of the few women in the Chicago press, covers the murders of Asta Eicher and her three children and, obsessed with finding out what happened to this beautiful family, allies herself with the man funding the investigation.

Buddhism, love, art and murder - welcome to the world of the Mindful Detective When a famously narcissistic performance artist is found floating in a tank of formaldehyde at her own private view, suspicion falls on those closest to her . . . Leading the murder investigation is DI Shanti Joyce, recently transferred from London to Yeovil following the collapse of her marriage and a case that went wrong. She soon concludes that the mystery requires left-field thinking, and when a colleague at the station suggests Vince Caine, aka the Mindful Detective, Shanti tracks him down to his remote cabin on the Undercliff at Lyme Regis. The pair delve into the artist's Bohemian circle and discover a hotbed of resentment and jealousy stretching all the way back to her scandalous art school days in Falmouth. But as they soon realise, the murderer is both canny and elusive - someone with a complex, warped motive who will do anything to point them elsewhere. Has Shanti made the wrong decision enlisting the unconventional and enigmatic Caine? Can the unlikely mix of her down-to-earth pragmatism and his otherworldly intuition really prove a winning combination? Or will a killer escape justice and leave Shanti's reputation in tatters?

Abducted cows? Crop circles? Surely Aisling Smith lives in a town filled with magic, and not science fiction. So why does it seem like the aliens are coming?At a town festival, a popular cow disappears. The following day, it's a man who's vanished. As more and more animals go missing, and crop circles appear around town, Aisling learns that the same thing has happened in Riddler's Edge once before. Have the missing men and animals been abducted by aliens, or is the culprit closer to home?