Formerly Murder in a Minor Key. "Albert is one of my all-time favorite sleuths " Tess Gerritsen, NYT Bestselling Author ..".shines with comic brilliance. Crossman has a gift for creating characters...who should show up in further adventures of Albert. And there should be more." Chicago Sun-Times "The novel is an exercise in the comic style, defying disbelief. To his credit, Crossman brings it off nicely. Albert is clearly a survivor, likely to be heard from again." Los Angeles Times Book Review "Crossman...creates an offbeat, sympathetic sleuth who meanders innocently through this tale like a...

(Formerly Dead of Winter) Winston Crisp, retired National Security Agent, is back in the thick of a murder investigation with more twists and turns than the coastline of Penobscot Island, its Maine setting. Although he barely survived his last adventures in A Show of Hands, Crisp's deductive instincts are still intact, even when faced with such baffling evidence as a corpse with tears in its eyes, shriveled feet, bruised knees, and a missing shoe. With his remarkable code-breaking and sleuthing skills, octogenarian Crisp uncovers a multilayered plot with roots in two other unexplained deaths,...

RETIRED INTELLIGENCE agent Winston Crisp thought his career of delving into dark, unpleasant secrets was long over. He'd forsaken adventure and settled comfortably into the tiny community on Penobscot Island off the coast of Maine. There, he's content to write poems no magazine will publish, gossip with the locals around the pot-bellied stove at the hardware store, and gain weight on his landlady's homestyle cooking. But when the body of a young woman is found, he just can't refrain from asking a few questions; how did she end up frozen in the ice of an abandoned quarry? Whose fingerprints...

A private plane crashes in the south Pacific. The lone survivor, rap star Rat Badger Junkmouth Flash, washes up on a desert island where he is confronted by a most unexpected resident. The island's only habitation is a magnificent mansion in which are twenty-two rooms. In each of these he will encounter a dimension of existence - and of himself - that he never imagined.

Father O'Shields knees creaked in painful complaint as he stooped over the man who lay crushed and bleeding on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. Flanagan threw his arms around the priest's neck, jerked him close, and pressed his lips close to the ear of his confessor. "Forgive me Father, for I 'ave sinned. I've sinned like hell." The tendrils of Flanagan's secret reach decades into the past and, unseen and unknown, affect the lives of the quartet of orphans it forced to flee from Ireland at the height of the famine, to America - a wild and lawless land they were forced to face with nothing...

The orbit of Albert's tiny, coffee-stained universe was elliptical and only rarely intersected that of the conventional world, generally in the vicinity of a Dunkin' Donuts. Some people called him a genius; some called him an idiot. He was inclined toward the latter opinion. To him, nothing made sense. He didn't think like most people. He didn't understand how they could spout their age, weight, Social Security Number, or home address off the top of their head without looking it up somewhere. He couldn't fathom why they cared about celebrities, or sports, or shrubbery, or the weather. The...

Things become exciting for Bean and Ab when Ab tells Bean that the boarding house in which she is staying is haunted. During the entertaining adventures that follow, the two become heroes in the Maine island community.