Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 1
Summary
Now, when China's friend Jo dies of an apparent suicide, China looks behind the quaint façade of Pecan Springs and takes a suspicious look at everyone. And though she finds lots of friendly faces, China is sure that one of them hides the heart of a killer.
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Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 2
Summary
In a small Texas town, what starts as a little festive Halloween fun ends in a brutal murder. And lawyer-turned-herbalist China Bayles is even more shocked when her friend Ruby, a New Age expert in tarot and astrology, becomes the prime suspect after a minister accuses her of witchcraft. Now it?s up to China to unmask the real killer...
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Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 4
Summary
In Pecan Springs, Texas, China Bayles, former lawyer and now owner of a herb store, discovers the body of a woman who is her double. It could be a crime of passion--the lady was going to divorce her husband--or, worse, someone is after China.
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Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 5
Summary
On a retreat in St. Theresa's, a convent in Texas, sleuth China Bayles observes nuns fighting over a legacy worth millions of dollars. One lot wants the money for more contemplation, the other for commerce. When fires break out and people die, China steps in.
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 7
Summary
Ex-lawyer turned herbalist and amateur sleuth China Bayles attends a chili cookoff where a womanizing judge dies of an allergic reaction to peanuts. And since everyone knows peanuts don't belong in a bowl of Texas chili, China knows something suspicious is afoot...
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 8
Summary
Sleuth and herbalist China Bayles of Pecan Springs, Texas, joins Mike McQuaid, the town's police chief to investigate the murder of a land developer. They have to hurry if they don't want the case to clash with their honeymoon. They are getting married.
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Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 9
Summary
Compelling, suspenseful, and wholly original, Mistletoe Man tells the story of China's search for justice--and of her struggle to reconcile the demads of her business with the desires of her heart.
8) Bloodroot
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Series
Summary
Lawyer-turned-herbalist China Bayles returns to the Deep South, where her family?s legacy of silence is at last broken?and the past finally, unforgettably, speaks the truth? A frantic phone call from her mother brings China back to her family?s Mississippi plantation?a place she?d forsaken long ago. But the late-spring air is thick with fear?and from the moment of her arrival, China knows that something has gone desperately wrong at Jordan?s Crossing....
9) Indigo dying
Author
Series
Summary
Times have been tough on Indigo, Texas. But now, as artists flock to the countryside in growing numbers, Indigo is experiencing a revival. In town to teach a workshop, herbalist China Bayles, like so many others, is committed to bringing Indigo back to life. Only one person stands in their way: longtime resident Casey Ford, who has decided to sell his profitable mining rights. Once the deal is done, Indigo will be dead and buried. But when Ford winds...
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 12
Summary
China Bayles and her husband, Mike McQuaid, become involved in the tangled affaire of Phoebe the Pickle Queen, owner of the largest pickle business in Texas, but things take a dangerous turn when Phoebe mysteriously vanishes.
11) Dead man's bones
Author
Summary
When China's teenage son finds some skeletal remains during a local cave dig, remains that show a not-so-accidental death, it's a disturbing development. But China doesn't let it distract her from the opening of the new community theater donated by the elderly Obermann sisters. Unfortunately, the haughty, bullying Jane Obermann, and her frail, frightened younger sister made the donation with a condition: that the first production be a play written...
12) Bleeding hearts
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 14
Summary
In Albert's engrossing 15th mystery to star China Bayles, herbalist, erstwhile lawyer and occasional gumshoe (after 2005's Dead Man's Bones), everyone in China's charming hometown of Pecan Springs, Tex., is stunned when the high school football coach, Tim Duffy, is murdered. The good coach, it turns out, had a nasty habit of getting sexually involved with teenage girls, and that criminal predilection led to his death. One of Duffy's victims had died...
13) Spanish dagger
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Series
Formats
Summary
Between the herb shop, the catering business, and a weekend paper-making class, China Bayles has her work cut out for her. And now China's half-brother is opening up old wounds, trying to investigate their father's supposedly accidental death, and her husband is taking on the case-meaning she's just bound to get involved.
14) Nightshade
Author
Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 16
Summary
China's herb shop and catering business may be thriving, but she's still reeling from her father's death, and not even remotely interested in her half-brother Miles's investigation into that event. China's husband, on the other hand, has no such qualms. And when fate forces her to get involved as well, China realizes it's time to bring the past to light-or else it will haunt her the rest of her life. But China and McQuaid discover that Miles may have...
15) Wormwood
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Series
Summary
While getting some much needed rest and assisting with some herbal workshops, China Bayles stumbles over old secrets in a Kentucky Shaker village after a shocking death occurs during her stay.
16) Holly blues
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Series
Summary
China Bayles is fit to spit when her husband's troubled ex-wife, Sally, shows up at her herb shop, claiming to be broke with nowhere else to turn. When she invites Sally to stay, China starts receiving menacing calls from an "ex" of Sally's, who seems to have a connection to the murder of her parents nearly a decade ago.
17) Mourning Gloria
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Series
China Bayles mysteries volume 19
Summary
After a woman is killed in an arson-homicide, Jessica Nelson, an intern-reporter at the local paper, is assigned to cover the story. When Jessica disappears, China Bayles is determined to find her, before she becomes a headline herself.
18) Cat's claw
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Summary
"Sheila Dawson has made history as the first female police chief in Pecan Springs, Texas. She's also cracked many a mystery in collaboration with local sleuth China Bayles--that's why everyone thinks she's such a smart cookie. Now, Sheila puts those smarts to work, sifting through secrets to find a killer on the prowl... Larry Kirk, Pecan Springs' computer guru, has been shot dead in his kitchen. At first Police Chief Sheila Dawson believes it to...
19) Widow's tears
Author
Summary
After losing her family and home in the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Rachel Blackwood rebuilt her house a hundred miles inland and later died there, still wrapped in her grief. In present-day Texas, Claire, the grandniece of Rachel's caretaker, has inherited the house and wants to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. But she is concerned that it's haunted, so she calls in her friend Ruby, who has the gift of extrasensory perception, to check it out....
Author
Series
Summary
With the help of a lawyer friend in Texas, China Bayles investigates a cold case involving a valuable piece of Mexican art after suspecting that it may be connected to the death of another friend.
"When China's and Ruby's friend Karen Prior is mugged in a mall parking lot and dies a few days later, China begins to suspect that her friend's death was not a random assault. Karen was a filmmaker supervising a student documentary about the fifteen-year-old...