more and more mysteries

I unearthed the bookmark while sorting through cross stitching supplies in the sewing room. I'd completely forgotten this one -- although now that I've got it back in my hand, I can remember buying the pattern and stitching it. I still can't decide whether the woman in the upstairs window is stealing a necklace or preparing to strangle an unsuspecting victim -- what do you think?

Now that I've found it again, I've started actually using it when I'm reading a book with actual pages.

I've already gushed about how much I loved Cut, Crop & Die. That book started me on a mystery reading binge. The Kindle version is still available for free. (If you don't have a Kindle, Amazon offers several free options for reading Kindle titles on your other devices.)

More free mysteries for your Kindle --


Design on a Crime (Deadly Décor Mysteries, Book 1)
Spying in High Heels (High Heels Mysteries)
Trouble in Mudbug (Ghost-in-Law Mystery/Romance Series)
Ms America and the Offing on Oahu (Beauty Queen Mysteries No. 1)
Killer Twist (A Ghostwriter Mystery)
Never Buried (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series)

Note -- All of these titles were listed as free when I wrote this post. The prices on Amazon change quickly, so please double-check the prices before you order them. You can find Amazon's currrent top 100 free mysteries here.

This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday over at We are THAT Family.

more free mysteries to download for your Kindle

One of the things I love most about my Kindle Fire is that there's always something to read.

Honestly, even without the Kindle, I'd have plenty to read. I spent my teen years working at a used bookstore. It's where I met my husband when I was sixteen. I got a great discount, and I got to take home books that were too damaged to sell, or that we had too many copies of. And then there were the book sales where romances were a dime a piece. Even after getting rid of more SUV loads of old paperbacks than I'm ever going to admit, I've still got boxes and boxes of unread books in the attic.

But there's something satisfying about picking out new ones. And the zombie apocalypse might start, or I might hurt my knee or wind up on bed rest without Internet access and suddenly find myself reading through all of those paperbacks....
and I don't think there are many cozy mysteries up in the attic....

Do I really need to justify downloading free books anyway?

There are a lot of free mysteries available today that I hadn't seen before. Now what I need is some time to actually curl up and read them!











Note -- All of these titles were listed as free when I wrote this post. The prices on Amazon change quickly, so please double-check the prices before you order them. You can find Amazon's current top 100 free mysteries here.

Free Kindle Mysteries

A couple of times a week, I browse Amazon's mystery pages looking for freebies to download onto my Kindle. This morning, the pickings were good so I decided to share them with you. All italics are from the book's descriptions on Amazon.



Poison Pen by Sheila Lowe

Before her body is found in her Jacuzzi, publicist to the stars Lindsey Alexander had few friends, but plenty of enemies. Yet, police are willing to accept the words scrawled on crumpled piece of paper nearby as evidence of suicide.

When handwriting expert Claudia Rose is called onto the case, she has a different opinion. And when her instincts push her to investigate further, Claudia finds herself entangled in a far darker scenario than she could have imagined.



Darkness and the Devil Behind Me by Persia Walker

In December 1923, Esther Todd was a lovely young pianist, a rising star. One month later, she was on the Most Wanted List. She had vanished along the snowy streets of a stormy night in Harlem and thieves had hit the home of her society patron, pulling off a million- dollar heist.

Were the disappearance and the robbery coincidence or conspiracy? Somebody knew, but nobody was talking. Three years later, the puzzles remained unsolved.

As a crime reporter, Lanie Price covered the initial case. Now a frustrated society columnist, she's ready for a change. It comes in the form of Esther's sister, Ruth.

Desperate for closure, Ruth begs Lanie to dedicate her Christmas column to the case. Maybe someone, somewhere will remember something. Seeking fresh material, Lanie starts asking hard questions, dangerous questions, the kind just about guaranteed to get her killed.



Strong Spirits by Alice Duncan

It's the 1920s and Daisy Gumm Majesty is doing her part to support her family as a medium by holding séances and interpreting tarot cards for the rich and famous.

When the wealthy Mrs. Kincaid comes to Daisy to help solve her husband's disappearance, Detective Sam Rotondo isn't far behind.

Sam isn't fooled by Daisy's choice of "vocation" and blackmails her into spying on the Kincaids.

Then Daisy reads Sam's cards... and the tables turn.

Note -- All of these titles were listed as free when I wrote this post. The prices on Amazon change quickly, so please double-check the prices before you order them. You can find Amazon's currrent top 100 free mysteries here.

Free Kindle Mysteries

I've been downloading freebies for my Kindle this morning, and thought some of these mysteries might interest you --



It’s just an ordinary day for octogenarian sleuth Myrtle Clover—until her yardman discovers a dead body planted in her backyard. This death isn’t cut and dried—the victim was bashed in the head with one of Myrtle’s garden gnomes.

Myrtle’s friend Miles recognizes the body and identifies him as Charles Clayborne… reluctantly admitting he’s a cousin. Charles wasn’t the sort of relative you bragged about—he was a garden variety sleaze, which is very likely why he ended up murdered. As Myrtle starts digging up dirt to nip the killings in the bud, someone’s focused on scaring her off the case. Myrtle vows to find the murderer…before she’s pushing up daisies, herself.



Elly Blair welcomes the chance to escape her ex-fiance and job from hell when Grandma Imelda, ready to retire to sunny Florida, calls for her to take over her little southern cafe.

Elly has no idea her grandmother has baked up magic for the unsuspecting townsfolk for thirty years–and now Grandma Imelda insists that Elly use her own hitherto unsuspected magical powers to carry on the family tradition.

But Elly’s new at this stuff. Her dishes don’t turn out as full of smidgens of enchantment and dashes of wishes come true as she’d hoped. When handsome customer Rory Covington takes a bite of the wrong burger, he ends up capturing the attention of every woman in town. Elly doesn’t know if her feelings for Rory are true or based on her magic gone awry.

Tom Owenton is an investigator the National Organization for Magic sent to look into the magical mishap. Unless Elly can reverse the spell, the cafe will be closed permanently. Tom is more than willing to help Elly out of this magical pickle, but she’s not sure she should accept his offer.

Elly only has forty-eight hours to find a way to reverse the spell, or she’ll lose the cafe and never discover if her feelings for Rory are real.



Even ‘death do us part’ couldn’t halt her march down the aisle…

Cash-strapped Maui wedding planner Pali Moon can’t believe her luck when a prospective bride flashing a five-carat dazzler pops into her shop, “Let’s Get Maui’d,” to request a glitzy beachside wedding. But then Pali learns the lavish wedding must take place on Valentine’s Day—only nine days away. Oh, and one other little hitch—the groom’s been missing at sea for more than a week. But no worries, the bride assures Pali, with or without the groom the wedding will take place. She’s struck a deal with the groom’s best friend to be the proxy groom, if necessary. Two days before the nuptials, a male corpse floats ashore on a South Maui beach. Looks like the groom’s finally shown up. So now what’s it gonna be—a wedding…or a funeral?



“On this nice July morning in Parkland, North Carolina, the office of Madeline Maclin Investigations might as well have been an Egyptian tomb: hot, dusty, and dead.” It doesn’t help that her landlord Reid Kent, does a brisk business…and briskly hits on Mac to rejoin his agency. He maintains no one will hire a former Miss Parkland as a serious PI.

Mac has been friends forever with Jerry Fairweather. Jerry claims to be psychic and is, unlike his two brothers, somewhat screwy. And he refuses to claim a share in the Fairweather fortune. But he shares some good news with Mac—his Uncle Val has died and left him a house. The two friends drive out to Celosia, a half hour away, where they discover a local beauty pageant in trouble and a house just perfect for setting up shop. A Psychic Shop. The arrival of lawyer Olivia, Jerry’s shark-like girlfriend, rouses both Mac’s interest in the mystery at the pageant and the one in her own heart.

And then comes the first murder….

All of the descriptions are from the Amazon website. I haven't had a chance to read any of these myself yet, but I don't know how long they'll be free, so I'm telling you about them before they're back to full price. If you get a chance to read the before I do, let me know what you think!

{I've Been Reading} Kindle Unlimited

For the past two months or so, I've been trying Kindle Unlimited. An ad had showed up in my Facebook feed offering three months for (I think) $2.99 and I'd been tempted for quite a while. It seemed like a perfect time to jump in and see if it was worth it.

My first disappointment was that the books that were formerly on Kindle Unlimited, the ones that made me want to try it in the first place, were no longer part of the program. I really should have checked that before I signed up.

In the first month, I read an absolutely awful horror novel. The problem with that one wasn't that it was "extreme," it was that was badly written and boring. I also read a not very useful book about boosting your writing productivity. And half of Harold the Haunted Doll: The Terrifying True Story of the World's Most Sinister Doll.  That one was entertaining, but I sure wouldn't pay the regular price for it.



I started the second month with Real Actors, Not People by Karen Musser Nortman. It's one of the Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries and my first reaction to the book was that I don't enjoy camping nearly enough to want to experience it vicariously through my cozy mystery reading.  I thought that I did, but when it came to campground showers and the configuration of hooks for hanging your clothes on I quickly changed my mind. The book does pick up its pace once all of the RVs are set up and everyone in the group has eaten and near the end it I got so caught up in the story that I wound up crying. (And it was real life camping experiences that made me aware of how scary the situation was...so there's that.)

With eighteen days left to go, I plan to cancel once my trial is up. I have so many other things to read, either library books or free Kindle titles or review copies from NetGalley, that this isn't working out for me. I found it hard to find Kindle Unlimited books while browsing on Amazon's site. Most of the titles I'm excited about reading are the ones I've found through the author's own self promotion and there are some I'm definitely excited about, but I haven't carved out time to read them. As few books as I've actually read so far, I think I'd be better off just paying for the ones I really want to read and maybe subscribing for a month at a time if there's a particular series I want to binge.

Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber? Do you find that it works well for you?

I want to know what happens!

I stumbled across Ink, Red, Deadwhen I was browsing for free Kindle books. It wasn't free, but the description (a scrapbooking sleuth visits the home of a cat hoarder and finds a corpse in the freezer) intrigued me enough that I ordered the short story and checked the library that afternoon for the first book in the series.

I wound up starting with the second book, Cut, Crop & Die. I don't know exactly what happened in the first book, but there was just enough backstory included for me to plunge in to Kiki Lowenstein's world where, in the first chapter, a woman dies at a crop party after she eats an orange scone poisoned with baby aspirin and the Epi-Pen in her purse turns out to be empty. (Maybe it's because aspirin was off limits to me for most of last year and we've been talking about getting an Epi-Pen now that we've got the bee hives, but that creeped me out.)

In addition to the intriguing murder mystery and fun side plots, there are scrapbooking tips between the chapters. When one of Kiki's classes make scrapbooks out of paper bags, the instructions are included a few pages later. And there's a minor romantic element that has me hooked.

As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to know what happened next. That's where the Kindle comes in. The Kiki Lowenstein mysteries are available in Kindle editions. Which only cost a dollar something less than the paperback, so in most cases I'd buy the physical book.

Did I mention that I really wanted to know what happened next? I didn't want to wait and see if whoever had it checked out from the library returned it on time, or wait for a copy of the paperback to be shipped to me.

Over the years, I've bought hundreds of books that I just had to read and, two decades later, the ones I didn't give away when we moved are still sitting here. At least half of the books I check out from the library for myself get returned unread. Some, I've checked out three or four times and still not even started. (I've also read hundreds more, but those aren't the ones I'm talking about here.)

That's another thing I love about the Kindle. I can add something I think I want to read to my wish list (so I don't forget what it was) and wait to spend the money until I'm actually ready to start reading it.

I'm halfway through my new purchase and loving every page. And hoping the fourth book will be available when we hit the library later this week.
Forget rating books with stars, I liked these books so much I spent the gift certificates I was saving for new dies or Bonnie Hunter's upcoming book -- that's saying something!

Nancy Drew book or kindle sleeve tutorial

If I'm going to keep carrying eighty year old mystery novels around in my purse (and I am, for the foreseeable future at least) I needed something to protect them from everything else I haul around on a daily basis. I don't care for book covers, so I made myself a book sleeve.

Not quite as obsessed with rereading the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books as I am right now? It also fits a Kindle.

Start by tracing Nancy Drew's shadow from one of the books (or Google Nancy Drew silhouette images) onto fusible web.  The one I used is from my 1930s edition of The Secret of the Old Clock. Enlarge so that she's just under 5" high.  Don't forget to reverse the image so that she's facing the right direction on your book sleeve.

Fuse onto black fabric and cut out. An Xacto knife is helpful for the heels and magnifying glass. And the scarf, if you're using one of Nancy's older incarnations.

Cut two 8" x 19" pieces of blue fabric and one matching piece of batting. Layer the pieces with the batting on bottom, then two blue pieces with the right sides facing.  Sew around outer edge with 1/4" seam allowance, leaving a 4" opening along one long side. Turn right side out.

With black thread, sew a straight line down the middle of the piece.  I didn't fuse Nancy into place until I'd done the freemotion embroidery on the front and back, so that I could decide which one I liked better.

Free motion quilt lines and loops to imitate the book spine. 

Fuse Nancy's shadow into place, then free motion quilt a line just inside the silhouette.

Fold in half with right sides together and sew a 1/4" seam down both long sides. Turn ride side out. The sleeve will snugly fit one of the vintage Nancy Drew books, or loosely fit a Kindle or Kindle Fire.

Now my vintage mysteries will be protected from everything in my tote bag...or almost everything. If you make one of your own, I'd love to see pictures.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT Family and Elm Street Quilts.

Free Cozy Mysteries for your Kindle!

It's a good day for free cozy mysteries over at Amazon... I found several that are new to me, and downloaded them all. I haven't read any of these myself yet, but if I wait until I've found time to read them, they may or may not be free anymore. They may not be free by the time you read these (Amazon prices change quickly, especially on ebooks) so make sure to check the prices before clicking that order button!

Murder by Syllabub--
A ghost in Colonial dress has been wreaking havoc at an old plantation house in Virginia. The house is owned by Elizabeth Smithwood, the best friend of Ellen’s Aunt Mary. Mary is determined to fly to the rescue, and Ellen McKenzie has no choice but to leave her real estate business and new husband to accompany her. Who else will keep the old girl out of trouble? When Ellen and Aunt Mary arrive, they find that Elizabeth’s “house” comprises three sprawling buildings containing all manner of secret entrances and passages, not to mention slave cabins. But who owns what and who owned whom? After Monty—the so-called ghost and stepson of Elizabeth’s dead husband—turns up dead in Elizabeth’s house, suspicion falls on her. Especially when the cause of death is a poisoned glass of syllabub taken from a batch of the sweet, creamy after-dinner drink sitting in Elizabeth’s refrigerator. Monty had enemies to spare. Why was he roaming the old house? What was he searching for? To find the truth, Ellen and her Aunt Mary will have to do much more than rummage through stacks of old crates; they will have to expose two hundred years of grudges and vendettas. The spirits they disturb are far deadlier than the one who brought them to Virginia. Murder by Syllabub is the fifth book of the Ellen McKenzie Mystery series.

Murder Half Baked--
A dead man in the cemetery, another in the bakery. Ellen McKenzie has to find the killer soon ... before another death puts a stop to her wedding. The groom is Dan Dunham, Santa Louisa’s Chief of Police. The guest list is growing and Ellen’s dreams of a small, intimate candlelight ceremony are rapidly disappearing. A major distraction is Ellen’s quest to find a new building for Grace House, a halfway house for needy women. Then she finds old Dr Sadler dead in the cemetery, his head bashed in by the arm of a marble angel. Every suspect is connected to Grace House. After it goes up in flames, all the residents, including one new-born, move in with Ellen and Dan. Will Ellen and Dan ever solve the murders and get their lives back?

Deadly Magic--
A night of magic turns into a night of murder.
It's Halloween night and the normally unhappy co-workers of the Straker Toy Company are eagerly looking forward to the celebration of their tyrannical boss' fiftieth birthday. None more so than Grace Holliday. After all, it's not every day she gets invited to the annual costumed bash at the Dragon's Lair, the premier magic theater in Manhattan.
What promises as a night of magic and mystery, quickly turns into a night of mayhem and murder when the boss' equally tyrannical wife dies on stage.
According to the police, it was an obvious suicide. Now it's up to Grace to discover which one of her co-workers pulled off the trick of the year before she becomes the killer's next victim.

Killer Cupcakes--
Things are going great for Lexy Baker. She's finally opened her dream bakery, gotten rid of her cheating boyfriend and settled into her grandmothers house with her perky dog Sprinkles at her side.
But her blissful life doesn't last long. When her ex boyfriend is found poisoned with cupcakes from her bakery, Lexy finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation headed up by her hunky neighbor detective Jack Perillo.
With the help of a gang of iPad toting, would-be detective grandmothers, Lexy decides to take it upon herself to find the real murderer in order to clear her name and get her bakery back in business.
As things heat up on the murder trail, in the kitchen and between Lexy and the hunky detective, it's a race against time to put the real murderer behind bars and get back to baking.
Will Lexy get her man?