The Gift Mckenna Mystery Series

Grace McKenna has a gift. When she looks into the eyes of criminals, she is inundated with glimpses of their crimes. A tortured woman, a drowning man, a frightened child. Being a small town police officer, she is forced to solve these cryptic cases on her own, maintaining secrecy while using her detective skills to obtain clues along the way. In Buried Secrets, Grace welcomes you back into her world as she tries to piece together another crime in Bridgeton, Massachusetts. When Grace responds to a routine call, she meets Miriam Caverly, an older woman with a past that is less than mundane. Alongside her boyfriend and ex-cop, Mark Connolly, Grace is thrown into a tangle of town secrets that force her to step outside the town's boundaries for answers that she is scared to face. A town drunk with a bitter past, a well-intentioned family strapped with the burden of a tragedy, and a lineup of memorable characters, make Buried Secrets an intense page-turner that follows The Gift in a perfectly aligned chain of events.

Stella Kendrick is an all-American heiress who can’t be tamed. But when the lively aspiring equine trainer tangles with British aristocracy, she meets her match—and a murderer . . . Like the Thoroughbreds she rides across the Kentucky countryside, Stella takes adventure by the reins when she’s asked to attend a mysterious wedding in rural England. But once she arrives at the lush Morrington Hall estate, her cold, ambitious father reveals that he has arranged to give away his daughter as bride to the Earl of Atherly’s financially strapped son . . . Stella refuses to be sold off like a prized pony. Yet there’s something intriguing about her groom-to-be, the roguish Viscount “Lyndy” Lyndhurst. The unlikely pair could actually be on the right track with each other . . . until they find the vicar who was to marry them dead in the library. Now, Stella and Lyndy must put their marriage on hold to prevent an unbridled criminal from destroying their new life together right out of the gate . . . “Delightful . . . Eccentric, humorous characters add to the intrigue . . . Fans of historical cozies will be enchanted.” —Publishers Weekly “Well-drawn characters, a richly described historical setting with details of horse racing, and a tentative romance distinguish this agreeable cozy.” —Booklist

When Tahoe Detective Owen McKenna answers his phone early one morning, a young boy named Paco cries out, “Help me!” McKenna talks to Paco and discovers that the boy is trapped in the back of a speeding pickup somewhere in Tahoe. In the front of the truck are two men who have just murdered Paco's foster mother. The men want the boy, but they don't yet know that the boy witnessed the murder and that he hid in their truck. As McKenna races to find Paco, he learns that the two men are contract killers from Las Vegas. They've killed before, using electronic stun guns to immobilize their victims prior to asphyxiating them with plastic wrap. While McKenna doesn't have a clue why the killers are after the boy, he knows that if he does nothing, the killers will keep coming for Paco. So McKenna plans to set a trap for them using Paco as bait. McKenna's plan carries a huge risk. If it goes wrong, he will be handing the boy to the killers....

Detective Grace McKenna has a gift. When she looks into the eyes of criminals, she is inundated with glimpses of their crimes. In book three of the McKenna Mystery Series, Grace finds herself face to face with a school principal holding onto a haunting past. When Grace makes eye contact with Principal Jack Whittaker on a routine visit to an elementary school, she is confronted with visions of a disturbed woman who is struggling to convey a message. In Never Tell, flashes of a heavily made-up face, a red rope that seems to lead to nowhere, and a rainy night in a familiar field, take Grace to places outside of Bridgeton to solve a crime that she hopes will help heal the town. Armed with the few clues that she has from a missing person case in the eighties, Grace untangles the mystery alongside a questionable witness.

"Disaster struck when twin sisters Jennifer and Melissa Salazar went hiking with their grandmother on their sixth birthday. Melissa got lost, fell off a cliff on the rock slide above Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe and died. It looked like a tragic accident. Eight years later, fourteen-year-old Jennifer want to hire detective Owen McKenna to look into the death which she believes was a murder ... When Owen begins to investigate, another body is discovered ... Owen uncovers information that takes him from Tahoe to San Francisco to a rich man's private island off the coast of Santa Barbara. The man directs him to an asylum in the Nevada desert ... [where] he learns of a long-buried secret that caused the murder of Jennifer's sister and several others in her family."--Back cover.

When the business partner of bio-tech genius Ryan Lear is murdered, and Ryan's life is threatened, he calls Tahoe Detective Owen McKenna for help. McKenna learns that someone is plotting to take over Ryan's fast-growing Silicon Valley company. McKenna is sent on a deadly chase that involves a scientific breakthrough at a high-altitude lab on a mountain above lake Tahoe.

Early one frigid morning in January a young man named Thos Kahale walked into the icy waters of Lake Tahoe and died a brutal death. Hired to investigate, Owen McKenna learns that the Hawaiian side of the man's family had a secret shrine hidden in a cave in the cliffs of Kauai. Owen Flies to Kauai and hears about a long-lost manuscript that Mark Twain left when he visited Kauai in 1866. The manuscript, which would be worth millions, is rumored to have been lost in a hurricane. Owen suspects that it was hidden in the secret shrine. As more people die, Owen tracks a vicious killer who looks like a Viking. Owen follws the Viking back to Tahoe and learns of a cave of ice that is sacred to Tahoe's Washoe Indians. Thos, who was half Washoe, may have hidden the manuscript in the Tahoe cave. Only one person, whose identity is unknown, knows the answer. Owen and his Great Dane Spot have to find that person before the Viking does, and they are running out of time as they chase the Viking up a mountain in a blizzard to a cave of ice and a battle to the death.

Leann wasn't good enough for her upper-crust in-laws, so they gave her the mansion none of them wanted. Years ago, something or someone in the house killed Leann's brother. Will its violent secrets kill her next? " . . . a spine-electrifying supernatural tale where a huge Southern States mansion contains one of the most terrifying, violent and indeed psychopathic ghosts to haunt any town. It is also a murder mystery-why did Robina Willets apparently kill all five of her young children, and her husband, before stabbing herself to death? And, if you are in the camp of believing that 'Justice . . . just is not, ' then this will have you frothing at the mouth with righteous social fury."--Tim Roux, author of Missio and The Dance of the Pheasodile Kathleen McKenna is a former adolescent social worker who holds a degree in Sociology. She is from Alaska and, after relocating to New Mexico, began writing. An admitted aficionado of a good scary tale, she began The Wedding Gift following a visit to New Orleans, where she saw a beautiful antebellum house and began imagining what if there were a beautiful young girl from the wrong side of the tracks who married her way in and then what if there was already a ghost there . . . . She shares her home in New Mexico with a morbidly obese, alcoholic Old English Sheepdog and is presently working on a new novel.