New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author
MAGGIE SHAYNE
and
Olive Heber Books
present
Arsenic and Old Ladies
In this wickedly dark comedy series, four sixty-something women turn an accidental murder into a lethal vigilante mission, hiding their victims beneath the town’s legitimate dead.
The stakes turn deadly as the matriarchs balance Sunday dinners with tactical strikes while the ringleader’s detective son investigates his own mother’s crimes.
Arsenic and Old Ladies
For a heartbeat, they think they got away with it. Then they hear from stranger who saw Bonnie’s crime via livestream. They realize he intends to silence them. They know too much
The ladies decide they have no choice but to silence him first. After all, they got away with it once.
Bonnie’s son Sam and her twin teen grandkids move back home. Sam’s taking a job with the Sheriff’s Department, investigating the very disappearance his sweet mom caused.
As Sam closes in on what’s looking more and more like a vigilante killer, Bonnie and her friends must keep their secret, all the while balancing Sunday dinners with with tactical strikes against a wealthy, powerful man who wants them dead…
A man who’s about to learn that the most dangerous thing in the neighborhood isn't him—it's the matriarchs who know where the bodies are buried.
Soft-spoken retired teacher Bonnie Tucker just killed a pedophile by accident.
She’d followed him home and lied to get into his house. Being a cop’s mom (out of state, thank goodness) she knows this looks bad. So she calls her very best friends for help.
Bonnie is the friend the other three always look out for. To save her Diane, Christine and Rosie bury the evidence with the town’s own dead. It’s Diane’s idea, a signature double-decker method to hide a corpse.
Diane always knows where there’s an open grave, after all. At her age, she’s on the cemetery’s mailing list.
Arsenic and Old Ladies II
Festive Fatalities
December 8th
From Maggie Shayne, a darkly funny holiday crime caper featuring four sixty-something BFFs, a blackmailer who knows exactly what they did last spring, and a Christmas that turns lethal before the stockings are even hung.
This year, the naughty list is a hit list.
The girls—four sixty-something besties—are counting on their best Christmas yet. The kids are home, the families are together, and for once everything feels merry and bright. Then teen mom Ruby Duncan corners Diane in a snowy mall parking lot, and holiday cheer takes a deadly back seat.
Ruby, a former victim of the late and unlamented “Dangerous Dan” Fitzpatrick, wants cash and a sample of the dead man’s DNA to blackmail his formidable widow. If Diane doesn’t deliver, Ruby will tell the police exactly who killed Fitzpatrick. Meanwhile, Bonnie realizes a fifteen-year-old student has been missing for a week—and fears the girl has fallen into the same trafficking ring she and her friends stumbled onto last spring. They’d stopped three of the ten men responsible. Not on purpose, but still. The rest scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on. Now they’re back at it.
As Bonnie’s detective son closes in on a vigilante hunting predators in his town, the cabal’s powerful members decide they’ve had quite enough of the relentless sexagenarian avengers determined to shut them down—and they mean to deal with the problem permanently.
Perfect for readers who love:
– Dark comedy holiday crime capers
– Vigilante grandmothers and fierce lifelong friendship
– Wintry, Christmas-set small-town suspense
– A blackmail plot, buried secrets, and deadly stakes
Arsenic and Old Ladies
After I finished Lone Wolf, and began talking about what I would write next, a dear writer friend who is also my publisher suggested I give myself permission to write anything I wanted to. I had been listing series that needed new volumes like assignments. The notion of writing whatever I wanted was a breath of fresh air. I hadn't even thought about doing that in forever, just about keeping fans of each series as happy as I, as one writer with only ten fingers, can.
So I decided to sleep on it. I told my muses to send me whatever story felt right, whatever wonderful thing they had ready, no matter what it was.
And then I dreamed about Bonnie, Diane, Rosa, and Christine. I woke up and couldn't get them off my mind. The scenes were just playing out in my head, one after the next. I couldn't wait to get to the keyboard to write them down.
This is the first time a book has come to me organically this way in many years. I usually pick the next book in line, demand a story, and then begin writing, often building the tale from scratch, which is way more work!
Not this one. This one is coming through so powerfully my fingers can barely keep up. I wrote the first draft, 60,000 words, in about 5 weeks.
And I named the characters according to who I would cast to play them in the movie, that's how clearly they came through to me. Diane is Diane Keaton. Bonnie is Bonnie Hunt. Christine is Christine Baranski. Rosa is Rosie Perez.
I'm offering personalized, signed copies via my local bookstore, ALL MY FRIENDS BOOKS (see above)
YOU CAN READ THE FIRST CHAPTER OF BOOK 1 HERE
