Mystery Authors (M)

Murder Rents a Room: Cliff's Edge mansion, in historic Greene County, Alabama, is a bit run down, to be sure, but a line had been drawn at dead bodies—at least until now. When drop dead gorgeous vamp Kitty Leigh Bolling—on her third husband and already on the lookout for a fourth—turns up at the old ancestral home, temperatures run high and the fur starts to fly. With southern passions proving positively murderous and bodies piling up at Cliff's Edge, can attractive widow Kate Frazier, trying to recover from the untimely death of her husband and to make a go of things at Cliff's Edge by taking in paying guests (including wanly handsome visitor Alex Dexter), avoid becoming Murder's next victim?

The Crimson Feather: Convalescing artist Ann Bartley has returned home to wartime Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from Chicago at the urgent though cryptic plea of her married adopted sister, Jean Tolliver. In Tuscaloosa Ann finds tensions running high among the Tolliver family. When Jean's wealthy father-in-law dies a highly suspicious death during a hunt in neighboring Greene County, Alabama, it's up to local sheriff Bill Davies to put an end to one vicious slay ride by catching yet another clever killer. While Sheriff Davies scents the clues to a dastardly crime, can Ann save her sister's sanity—not to mention her own life?

The House that Hate Built: When widowed bank president James Clark weds a second time, to the previously married Margaret Branch, mother of glamorous divorcee Margo Branch, it was a dark day for James Clark's blue-blooded spinster sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, who made it clear to Margaret that she was beneath their notice socially. Margaret retaliated by having her husband build her a house right next door to the Clark sisters, so that the two women would have to look at that house every single day for the rest of their lives. However it's Margaret who dies first, viciously stabbed to death in her house—the house that hate built. Suspects are myriad, and it will take all of Monroe sheriff Frank Garner's wiles to bring the vicious crime—and the ones that follow it—home to the culprit.

The Whip: In Chicago Carla Ives stands accused of the poisoning murder of her diabetic widowed great-aunt and guardian, Mrs. Sarah Willingham, whose every cruelly barbed word was like the lash of the whip to her vulnerable ward. Tasked with determining whether Carla, who has confessed to the heinous crime, is criminally insane, psychiatrist Dr. Mark Sargeant persuades the beautiful young woman to tell him the story of the miserable years which she spent under her cold guardian's "care." What he learns convinces him that Carla could not have been Mrs. Willingham's murderer—yet who was it, in that case, who killed the hateful old woman?