Fiction

While Geneva Bay, Wisconsin’s upper crust gets ready to party down at a Prohibition-themed fundraiser, pizza chef Delilah O’Leary is focused on seeing her struggling restaurant through the winter slow season. The temperature outside is plummeting, but Delilah’s love life might finally be heating up, as hunky police detective Calvin Capone seems poised (finally) to make a move. But Delilah’s hopes of perfecting a new “free-from” pizza recipe for charity bash are dashed when a dead body crashes the party. Soon, Capone, Delilah, and her entire staff are trapped in an isolated mansion and embroiled in a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

To catch an increasingly-desperate killer, Delilah will have to top all of her previous crime-solving accomplishments, and a few pizzas, too.

Newly single pizzeria owner Delilah O’Leary is struggling to keep her restaurant afloat in the resort town of Geneva Bay, Wisconsin. On the plus side, her strong-willed, “big-boned” cat Butterball is (mostly) sticking to his diet. On the minus side, while Delilah has been focused on pumping out perfect pizza pies, her ex-fiancé has cozied up to a new squeeze, juice bar owner Jordan Watts–Delilah’s rival in Geneva Bay’s annual “Taste of Wisconsin” culinary contest.

When one of Jordan’s juice bar customers is poisoned by a tainted smoothie, Delilah lands deep in the sauce. Accusations fly, suspects abound, and a menacing stranger turns up with a beef over some missing dough. Between kale-juicing hipsters and grudge-bearing celebrity chefs, Delilah must act quickly before another one bites the crust.

Delilah O’Leary can’t wait to open her new gourmet deep-dish pizzeria in Geneva Bay, Wisconsin—a charming resort town with a long history as a mobsters’ hideaway, millionaires’ playground, and vacation mecca. Engaged to a hunk with a hefty trust fund, Delilah is poised to begin a life that’s just about as delicious as one of her cheesy creations.

Just before opening night, though, Delilah’s plans for pizza perfection hit the skids when her fiancé dumps her and leaves her with a very large memento from their relationship—Butterball, their spoiled, plus-sized tabby cat.

Delilah’s trouble deepens when she discovers a dead body and finds her elderly aunt holding the murder weapon. Handsome local police detective Calvin Capone, great grandson of the legendary gangster, opens an investigation, threatening to sink Delilah’s pie-in-the-sky ambitions before they can even get off the ground. To save her aunt and get her pizza place generating some dough, Delilah must deliver the real killer.

For hospital chaplain Lindsay Harding, facing death is part of the job. After all, she spends her working days comforting sick and dying patients. But when the annual Civil War reenactment in her hometown of Mount Moriah, North Carolina produces a real casualty, the Grim Reaper suddenly gets a little too close for comfort. With the clock ticking, the police struggle to unravel how and why a beloved local re-enactor was shot in front of hundreds of on-lookers. Will courage, curiosity, and Lindsay’s irreverent brand of religion be enough to catch the killer before she becomes the next victim?

Lindsay Harding Mystery, No. 2

Award-winning author Mindy Quigley delivers another killer shot of southern comfort in book two of the bestselling Lindsay Harding Series