When murder happens in the small town of Lincoln Point CA, there aren't many degrees of separation between the victim and retired teacher Gerry Porter. How can she stay away from the investigation when the crime scene is the venue for her marriage to Henry Baker? But this time, nephew Detective Skip Gowen tries to discourage Gerry's and granddaughter Maddie's efforts to solve The Case. He couldn't live with himself if the murderer learns of their efforts and comes after them....
"When murder happens in the small town of Lincoln Point, California, there aren't many degrees of separation between the victim and retired teacher Gerry Porter. How can she stay away from the investigation when the crime scene is the venue for her marriage to Henry Baker? But this time, nephew Detective Skip Gowen tries to discourage Gerry's and granddaughter Maddie's efforts to solve 'The Case.' He couldn't live with himself if the murderer learns of their efforts and comes after them." --
In the tradition of George Saunders and Aimee Bender, an exuberantly imagined debut that chronicles an ordinary world marked by unusual phenomena. The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that thrums with energy and shimmers with beauty. In “The Artist’s Voice” we meet one of the world’s foremost composers, a man who speaks through his ears. A hijacked plane circles a city for twenty years in “Pilot, Copilot, Writer.” Sound can kill in “The Sounds of Early Morning.” And, in the title story, a man is at war with the wife he accidentally shrank. For these characters, the phenomenal isn’t necessarily special—but it’s often dangerous. In slightly fantastical settings, Gonzales illustrates very real guilt over small and large marital missteps, the intense desire for the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges we feel to defend and provide for the people we love. With wit and insight, these stories subvert our expectations and challenge us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Brilliantly conceived, strikingly original, and told with the narrative instinct of a born storyteller, The Miniature Wife is an unforgettable debut.
Gerry’s crafts are small-scale, but her to-do list is anything but. Add murder to that—with one of her students as a suspect—and you have one hectic holiday. Time to shrink this mystery down to size.
While teaching her granddaughter, Maddie, the art of creating miniatures, Gerry Porter comes to the aid of her neighbor's friend June who has been wrongfully accused of murder and discovers that sticking her nose where it doesn't belong can be deadly. Original.
A MINIATURE MYSTERY. First in a big new series. Geraldine Porter thought that being the chairwoman of the local Dollhouse and Miniatures Fair would give her leisure time to spend on her favorite craft. That was before a fellow miniatures afficionado is suspected of murder, leaving Gerry to prove the woman's innocence-or die trying.
Math Professor Sophie Knowles finds herself in the middle of an investigation after her friend, Henley College librarian, Charlotte Crocker, is found dead in the stacks. When Sophie learns that Charlotte wasn't the quiet, law-abiding citizen she seemed to be, she sets out to determine who her friend really was, and to find her killer. As she deals with a group of lottery players, winners and losers, the odds are Sophie will solve the puzzle.
It's the fall of 1965 when 28-year-old Sister Francesca leaves her small town convent in upstate New York to study theology at a large university in the Bronx. She expects to face demanding professors and challenging classes; she doesn't expect to become entangled in the controversies surrounding Vatican II. What she least expects is involvement in the mysterious death of her new Superior, Mother Ignatius. Was the old woman a victim of greedy neighborhood businessmen? Or was she simply in the way of unstoppable changes in the Church? In the process of investigating her Superior's murder, Sister Francesca risks her life and must come to terms with the changing world around her, a challenge to both her faith and her vows.
