Former beauty queen and fledgling private investigator Madeline Maclin has married her best friend, Jerry Fairweather, and settled into his old house in the small town of Celosia, North Carolina. Jerry seems to have given up his cons and schemes but not his phony séances. Then Amelia Lever, an unpopular teacher at Celosia Elementary School, dies mysteriously. Convinced hers is not a natural death, Maddy starts to investigate. And then comes Maddy's...

When clever Aunt Ant moves to the zoo, she describes the quirky animal behavior she observes by speaking in homophones, from the moose who loved mousse to the fox who blew blue bubbles.

"While taking the yearly otter count at a marsh near Gunn Landing Harbor, California, zookeeper Theodora Bentley sees Maureen, her favorite otter, swimming around clutching someone's expensive smartphone. When Teddy rescues the device, she discovers a photograph of a murder-in-progress. A hasty search soon turns up the still-warm body of Stuart Booth, PhD, a local Marine Biology instructor"--

"The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a five-year-old boy's world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the zoo, throwing all of Oklahoma City into dangerous excitement, in this evocative story of a child's confrontation with his deepest fears. For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around...