Lesa's Book Critiques: Kevin’s Corner Annex – Beach Blonde Betrayal by Elaine Viets

 Lesa's Book Critiques: Kevin’s Corner Annex – Beach Blonde Betrayal by Elaine Viets

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery by Elaine Viets

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Myster...: Reviewed by Jeanne The Florodora is a very exclusive apartment complex in Peerless Point, Florida.   You can’t just buy your way in, or ...

Review: Beach Blonde Betrayal: A Florida Beach Mystery by Elaine Viets

This book comes out this Tuesday….

 

Having previously read the first book of this series, Sex and Death on the Beach, I happily requested Beach Blonde Betrayal when it appeared on NetGalley. As the publisher, Severn House, has had me preapproved for anything in their vast catalog for years now, I was quickly able to download the book and start reading. There is less sex on the beach, but a lot more murder in this installment of The Florida Beach Mysteries.

 

Nora McCarthy, a native Floridian, owns and operates, “The Florodora” in Peerless Point. The classic apartment building sits on the beach approximately at the midpoint between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, Florida. Her tenants, beyond her boyfriend Dean who has law enforcement experience and is now in exile in Witness Protection for very good reason, are people who honor the idea of the Florida Man/Woman you see in news reports. But, they do it in good ways by being eccentric, colorful, trusting of others, and bastions of the South Florida culture and style. They are all fun, eccentric, and play a major role in keeping the building alive and vibrant.

 

Because of the way they are, they could be a bit more susceptible to romance scams than the average person. It is also way easier for the police, in a separate storyline, to suspect one of their own as the culprit behind a string of murders of blonde women found dead on the beach. Both are in play in this complicated mystery that also features a separate murder just outside the four story Florodora apartment building as well.

 

Fortunately, Norah has a knack for investigation and Dean is present to assist with his law enforcement investigative skills. As they deal with new issues in their personal relationship and hurt feelings, they unite to help their fellow friends in the building. A building where the people think of themselves as family and have their own interrelationship issues. Things get complicated and don’t always work out as planned, but like life itself, this is how it plays out.

 

The result is an entertaining mystery full of a cast of characters and constant twists and turns. While it is always preferable to have read the first book of a series first, one could easily read Beach Blonde Betrayal: A Florida Beach Mystery first as spoilers for the previous book are minimal. It is also a solidly good cozy style mystery and a lot of fun.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4oveckC

 

 

As previously noted, my digital ARC came from the publisher, Severn House, through NetGalley, with no expectation of a positive review.

 

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2026

SleuthSayers: How Grandma’s Old-Time Songs Inspired My New Mystery Series by Elaine Viets, Guest Blogger

SleuthSayers: How Grandma’s Old-Time Songs Inspired My New Myste...: By Elaine Viets, Guest Blogger Elaine Viets , our guest blogger today, is a highly popular mystery author whose fourth series launched t...

Publication Day Review: Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery by Elaine Viets

 

Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery is the first book in a new cozy mystery series by Elaine Viets. Filled with a host of colorful and eccentric characters, a great setting, a couple of mysteries, and plenty of humor, the result is a really good and highly entertaining cozy style mystery. All too soon the read is over leaving one wanting more.

 

Norah McCarthy owns and operates the apartment building known to all as “The Florodora.” Inherited from her grandmother, Norah keeps the traditions surrounding the building alive and well. This happens even though developers want the place and there are issues with upkeep of the building and the grounds. The place is over one hundred years old. That means history is everywhere inside and outside of the building. Located in Peerless Point, Florida, a beach town between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, the place is full of a cast of characters who are renters and also family.

 

History is important and part of everything at The Florodora, but the kind of history that has been just uncovered is the kind of history that Norah McCarthy could really do without. The pool is broken. Again. The Sykes brothers have been using a mini excavator to tear up the courtyard so that they can get to the pipe problem. Again. They still have not gotten to the pipe, but the work is done for now.

 

They have found a buried body.

 

All indications are that the body is of Sammie Lant. A notorious porn star who had recently been riding a wave of publicity built on her riding a certain college athlete on the beach. The video went viral and the public went crazy.

 

She also had tried to rent an apartment at The Florodora only to have Nora McCarthy emphatically tell her no. Sammie had tried again two more times and had gotten nastier each time. The last time, back in April five months ago, the two women had a very loud and very public argument which had resulted in the police being called. Eventually, a local cop, Jordan DeMille, escorted Sammie off the property as Sammie loudly complained that Norah had threatened her life.

 

She had.

 

Now Sammie lies dead in a hole near the pool at The Florodora. As it happens, the same cop who heard Norah threaten Sammie months ago is a Detective. Norah, who is worried that one of her residents might have done the dead, never thought of herself as a suspect. In the eyes of Detective Jordan Demille and other members of the Peerless Point Police, she most definitely is a suspect. Not the only one, but a suspect of significant importance.

 

Now Sammie is dead and buried on her property and that is a huge problem. If only Liam and Lester hadn’t found the body. But, they did, and the media is soon all over everything and hounding residents. With things getting worse by the hour and day, and DeMille and crew seemingly focused on her, it isn’t surprising that Norah starts investigating as best as she can. The goal, with a little help from her friends, is to clear her good name and restore peace and tranquility for all at The Florodora.

 

Way easier said than done.

 

Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery is a highly entertaining cozy mystery read. Plenty of eccentric characters, a complicated backstory, and lots of action and suspense make the read a real page turner. This fast read with plenty of humor hooks the reader into various mysteries, past and present, and gradually reveals them all. Strongly recommended.

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4533dqT

 

 

Published by Severn House, I picked up my reading copy via NetGalley without any expectation of a review. I went and got the book last week after I read the guest post by Elaine Viets for my blog where she provided the first chapter. 

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

Guest Post: Excerpt: Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery by Elaine Viets

  

Please welcome author Elaine Viets back to the blog today as she shares the first chapter excerpt from her new book, Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery. This first book in the series, published by Severn House, is scheduled to be released on June 3^rd. It is available from Amazon and other vendors.

 

“Sex and Death on the Beach: A Florida Beach Mystery

 

Chapter 1

 

          My name is Norah McCarthy, and I own the most exclusive apartment building in Peerless Point, Florida. The Florodora is more than a hundred years old, the first apartment building in this south Florida beach town between Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

          You don’t need money or social status to rent an apartment at the Florodora. You must be a member of a more exclusive group. You have to be a genuine Florida Man or Woman. You’ve seen the headlines: “Florida Man Busted with Meth, Guns and Baby Gator in Truck.” Or: “Florida Woman Bathes in Mountain Dew in Attempt to Erase DNA after Committing Murder.”

Yes, those are real headlines.

Florida Men and Women stories often involve alcohol and alligators, although the Florida Man who tossed a live alligator the size of a Labrador through the drive-up window of a burger joint was probably sober.

Seems this Florida Man found a gator by the road and dumped it in the back of his pickup (pickups are Florida Man’s favorite vehicle). Then he got out of the truck and chucked the gator through the burger joint drive-up window. After he paid for his soft drink.

Unbelievable?

That’s the standard reaction to Florida Man. Are there any limits on his (or her) so-called pranks?

Nope. And many of them aren’t funny. Including the Miami Cannibal, a naked marauder who attacked an innocent man, chewed off the poor guy’s face and left him blind. The cops shot that Florida Man dead.

A slang dictionary says Florida Man “commits bizarre or idiotic crimes, popularly associated with – and often reported in – Florida.”

Florida Man, known as the “world’s worst superhero,” became nationally famous in 2013 when he was given his own Twitter account. He’s inspired a play, two TV series, songs, and more.

          Like many Floridians, my feelings about Florida Man and Woman are somewhere between appalled and perversely proud. I’m descended from an early Florida Woman, my grandmother, Eleanor Harriman.

          Grandma always had a soft spot for scapegraces, since she was one herself. She was a Florodora Girl, a superstar chorus girl a century ago. Grandma was in the 1920 Broadway production of Florodora, before she eloped with handsome Johnny Harriman, a millionaire, back when a million was real money. She was married at sixteen and madly in love.

          When I was old enough, Grandma told me about poor Johnny’s accidental death, which involved a champagne bottle and a chandelier.

          “I loved that man,” Grandma said. “I’m glad he died happy.”

          Johnny’s death made Grandma a rich widow at seventeen. She moved to Peerless Point and built this apartment building right on the ocean in 1923, on a narrow barrier island.

          The building was as quirky as Grandma, with grand rooms, odd hideaways and at least one secret staircase. To her bedroom.

          Grandma never married again, but she never lacked for male companionship. In 1941, Grandma left the apartment with a caretaker and went north to New York for six months. She returned in mid-December with a newborn baby girl, Dot, my mother. Grandma said she’d adopted an unmarried cousin’s baby.

Was Dot Grandma’s real daughter? No one knows for sure.

I moved in with Grandma when I was four, after my parents were killed by a drunken driver in 1988. The residents became my family, an eccentric collection of honorary uncles and aunts. When Grandma died at age ninety-eight some twenty years ago, she left me the Florodora.

          I miss her. Every day. I’m reminded of her constantly. Her life-size portrait dominates the apartment building’s office on the first floor. Florodora Girls had to be either brunettes or redheads, weigh no more than 130 pounds and stand five-feet-four inches tall. Grandma insisted that was “tall for the time.” I inherited her thick dark hair and hope mine will turn the same shade of white as Grandma’s hair when I get older. I’m five-feet-ten. I got my height from my father.

          The Florodora is a prime example of high-style Spanish Colonial, a white stucco structure with a red barrel-tile roof. The windows in front have elaborate plaster Churrigueresque, which make the windows look like they’re framed in cake frosting.

If you drive past the Florodora on South Ocean Drive, you’ll see the old white apartment building looks much the same as it did during the roaring Twenties. It’s shaded by palm trees and surrounded by a coral rock wall with purple bougainvillea spilling over the top. The Florodora is set back from the sidewalk by a courtyard cooled with a jungle of tropical plants.

The courtyard’s centerpiece is a swimming pool with a flirty Twenties’ bathing beauty in mosaic on the bottom. Most days you’ll find the apartment’s carefully curated collection of misfits sunning themselves by the pool.

Not today. The plumbers, Liam and Lester Sykes, were digging up the courtyard. Once again, the antique plumbing was a problem.

The Florodora needs constant maintenance. That may be why it’s almost the only old Florida building left on Ocean Drive. On either side of the building, and marching relentlessly down to Miami, are high-rise condos. Most look like shoeboxes standing on end.

Developers offered Grandma fabulous sums for the Florodora and its five-acre lot, but she stubbornly refused to sell.

Grandma made me promise not to sell the building or the property. I gladly keep that promise. I love the Florodora almost as much as I loved Grandma. Besides, there’s no reason to sell it. I have plenty of money. I’m forty-one and love beach life.

What you can’t see from the road is the beachfront. The Florodora sits on the edge of the Beachwalk, a wide strip of boardwalk teeming with tourists and vendors selling everything from ice cream and rum-filled pineapples to T-shirts and beach umbrellas. The sea air smells of salt and suntan lotion and the breeze is soft on the hottest days.

I longed to be out there now, but I couldn’t lounge on the beach. After I got the bad news from the plumber, I went back inside to finish my work. I needed to find a new resident for the empty apartment.

I kept my grandmother’s tradition of renting to Florida Men and Women, using my gut feeling. After years of living with Grandma’s choices, I thought I could recognize the more benign versions of the breed.

There was no way I could advertise for the resident I wanted. I needed a referral from someone I trusted. Ben the beach cop had found two possible renters. The third one just showed up.

The four-story Florodora has eight apartments. Each floor has only two suites, and they’re two thousand square feet. That’s huge by beach standards. People will kill for a big, affordable apartment with ocean views.

The special Floridians at the Florodora Apartments have never been in the news – not yet, anyway. Not even Billie, who held up a convenience store with a banana and stole three overdone dogs from its hot dog roller grill.

The empty apartment is on the first floor. Next to it lives Mickey, our artistic saboteur. Kind, gentle Mickey lives alone and works as a freelance artist, but she’s been known to vandalize for a good cause.

My favorite prank was what Mickey did in the local gas station bathroom. In the restroom was a wall-mounted infant diaper changing station that pulled down into a changing bed. Mickey put a sign on the plastic baby bed that said, “Place sacrifice here.”

Right above Mickey, on the second floor, lives Lennox, a Shakespearean actor and my grandmother’s last tenant. Somewhere in his seventies, I’m not sure if Lennox is a real Florida Man. Maybe forty-five years ago, when Grandma rented to a flamboyantly gay actor, that was a qualification.

Next to Lennox on the second floor is a real Florida Woman, Willow. Five years ago, Willow was a successful Manhattan model known as Gorgeous Gwen. Max Devine, a big deal designer, caught her eating a cheeseburger and fries in a diner.

“Stop that, darling.” He tried to take the cheeseburger out of her hand. “Fast food will make you fat.”

“Not as fat as your head,” she said, and broke the plate over his head.

Fortunately, Gwen (now Willow) had saved enough money to retire to Florida, where she cultivates pot and studies Eastern philosophy.

Willow loves bright flowers and good weed. I can smell what Willow is doing. She’s smoking her latest cannabis crop on her back balcony, where she gardens. Willow has long blonde hair and wears loose, floaty clothes.

Billie the banana bandit lives on the third floor. Since he couldn’t hang by the pool today, he retreated to his living room to watch old movies. Rocky, by the sound of it. Billie writes retrospectives about movies. His first book was a New York Times bestseller.

I live on the top floor, in Grandma’s old apartment. Dean the diver lives next door to me. That’s convenient, since Dean and I are sometime lovers. I’m sure the whole building knows that. Dean is forty-two, with blond hair and hazel eyes. Smart and funny. A certified hunk. Grandma would have said he was the bee’s knees.

I went with a different gut feeling when I saw Dean. I felt the Florodora could use some eye candy. I admired Billie the banana bandit’s fine mind, but Billie could turn a person into a pillar of salt when he talked about his latest movie obsession.

I’m the only one who knows Dean is an ex-cop who went in to Witness Protection after he testified against fifteen mobsters who ran online prostitution rings, selling underage girls. The mob put out a contract on Dean while he spent two stressful years testifying against the cyber-pimps. Dean’s testimony put fourteen mobsters in prison. Another hanged himself.

A visit to a plastic surgeon changed Dean’s looks. Now he lives at the beach, drinking, fishing and diving. It’s lobster season, and today he’s diving for spiny lobsters.

I like our current residents, though not in the same way as Dean. I was relieved when the live-in staff agreed to stay on after Grandma died. Calypso, the housekeeper, is Bahamian, what the islanders call a “big-panty woman.” She is proud of her callipygous posterior. Calypso keeps the Florodora shining and cleans the residents’ rooms, as she sings spirituals in a pure, clear contralto, a preview of the heavenly choir.

          Rafael, a dark, stocky man who knows inventive ways to repair ancient machinery, handles maintenance and takes care of the grounds. He keeps the building one step ahead of the city inspectors, who are determined to shut us down. I figure the inspectors are in the pay of the developers, and will get a hefty bonus if they successfully condemn the Florodora.

Rafael has a bachelor apartment above the garage. Calypso lives rent-free in my parents’ old apartment. Calypso is quirky, but too hard-working to be a Florida Woman. The same goes for Rafael. He’s definitely not Florida Man material.

So that’s the Florodora line-up: a Shakespearean actor my grandmother found, and my four picks: Billie the banana bandit; Mickey the artistic saboteur; Willow, the pot-smoking ex-model; and Dean the diver.

I did well picking those four, so you’d think I’d know exactly who’d fit in, but I couldn’t find the right person. I sat behind the reception desk, reading through my application files.

One applicant was an accountant. I asked him what was the craziest thing he’d ever done. He confessed to skinny dipping “but it was dark and I was alone. No one saw me.”

He definitely wasn’t a Florida Man. Especially since he wanted “peace and quiet.”

I could hear Calypso vacuuming the upstairs hall and singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” while the Sykes brothers tore up the courtyard with a mini-excavator. Rafael was trimming the bougainvillea with something that sounded like a dental drill. Drunken college students were playing beach volleyball to cheers and loud Eighties music.

No way that accountant would be happy at the Florodora. Sorry, sir, I thought. No peace and quiet here. Application denied. For your own good.

A woman wanted an apartment for herself and her sixteen “very clean cats.” The craziest thing this woman ever did was make a kitty litter cake for a party. The cake looked like a dirty litter box, using melted Tootsie Rolls. It was served in a real litter box.

Yuck. No thank you.

I still had the three applications from Sammie Lant. Ugh. That woman ignited such a red rage in me, I forgot manners and customer service. About six months ago, she applied for the empty apartment. I told her no. She was the worst kind of Florida Woman.

Sammie was locally famous – make that notorious – for having sex on the beach with a college quarterback during spring break. The beach cop threw a blanket over the copulating couple and hauled them off to jail for indecent exposure. The judge fined them both, but Sammie’s partner lost his college scholarship for lascivious behavior.

Sammie thought it was funny that she’d destroyed a young man’s promising career.

          She was back the next week, offering me double the rent. I still said no. The third time Sammie caught me when I was outside, watering the courtyard plants. Calypso was sweeping. Sammie was dressed formally for Florida, in a red blouse, black pleather skirt, and red heels with rhinestone butterflies. Her blonde hair hung loose and her bulging breasts were nearly falling out of her top. A rhinestone butterfly rested in her décolleté.

This Sammie attempted a hoity-toity accent. “The Lants are an old Lancaster family,” she said. “That’s Lancaster in England. Your building has nothing but nobodies.” She looked pointedly at Calypso and said, “And mutts.”

          That’s when I lost my temper. “Old families are like potatoes,” I said. “The best part is underground. And that’s where I’d like to put you. If you ever come back and insult me or my residents again, you’ll regret it. I will never, ever rent that apartment to you. I will rent it over my dead body. Or better yet, yours.”

          We must have been arguing pretty loud, because someone called 911. Jordan DeMille, a Peerless Point cop, showed up. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard.

          Sammie cried crocodile tears and said, “Did you hear that, Officer? She threatened my life.”

          “Yeah, yeah, Sammie,” Jordan DeMille said. Like most of the local force, he was sick of Sammie’s shenanigans. DeMille marched Sammie out of there, to the cheers of the Florodora residents.

“If that woman moved in here, I would have given notice,” Calypso said. All the other residents had quietly told me the same thing. Sammie was universally hated at the Florodora.

          I checked the stack again, but there were no more applicants. I listened to the clock tick and the familiar blend of Florodora noise, when suddenly I heard loud screams. So loud, Calypso switched off her vacuum and pounded outside. I followed her. We were hit by a horrible sight.

          A muddy Liam the plumber was pointing into the hole excavated for the pipes and shouting, “Dead. Real dead.” Lester was throwing up in a potted palm.

          I looked over the side of the excavation. Even though the body was reduced to a pile of cartilage, bones and scraps of skin that looked like dirty clothing, I knew who it was.

          Sammie Lant. She’d been strangled with a gold bikini top.

I felt like I’d been socked in the stomach. Was one of the Florodora’s residents a killer?

 

                                      ***

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4kMcwjF

 

 

Elaine Viets ©2025

 

Elaine Viets has written 34 mysteries in four series, including the Josie Marcus, Dead-End Job, and Angela Richman, Death Investigator mysteries. With Sex and  Death on the Beach, Elaine Viets returns to her adopted home, South Florida. Her first Florida Beach mystery will be published June 3^rd. Elaine’s award-winning short stories are collected in Deal with the Devil and 13 Short Stories. She’s won the Agatha, Anthony and Lefty Awards and was honored with Malice’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: A Scarlet Death by Elaine Viets

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: A Scarlet Death by Elaine Viets:   Reviewed by Jeanne Angela Richman is a death investigator for Chouteau County, which means she is one of the first called to the scene...

Guest Post: Excerpt: A Scarlet Death by Elaine Viets

Please welcome author Elaine Viets back to the blog today as she shares the first chapter excerpt from her new book, A Scarlet Death. This is the latest book in her Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery Series. The book comes out on Tuesday, April 2nd from Severn House, and is available from Amazon and other vendors.

 

 

A Scarlet Death: An Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery

 

 

Chapter 1

 

Selwyn Skipton’s murder scene was one of the strangest, and I’ve seen a lot of them in my job.

          The seventy-year-old CEO was buck-naked on a bed with black satin sheets. A silk tie, in a muted shade of blue, was knotted around his neck. There was nothing muted about the large, red letter “A” stapled to his gray-haired chest.

          Yep, stapled.

          I thought Skipton would be the last man to die on black satin sheets. He was a devoted husband who made big donations to charities – unfashionable causes that helped the illiterate read, the hungry eat, and the homeless find shelter. In short, a good man.

          Selwyn was strangled in an apartment above the Chouteau Forest Chocolate Shoppe. My town is so rich, we don’t have shops. We have prissy shoppes.

          I’m Angela Richman, a death investigator for Chouteau County, a fat cat community forty miles west of St. Louis, Missouri. Chouteau Forest is the largest town in the county.

          Selwyn’s murder was discovered by Maya Richards, the chocolate shop owner. When she opened the store that morning, Maya smelled something that definitely wasn’t chocolate. She followed her nose up the back stairs to the apartment, where the door was unlocked, and poked her head in. One look at the strangled Selwyn, and she sprinted downstairs. When Maya recovered her breath, she wailed like an air raid siren, then called 911.

          That’s how Detective Jace Budewitz and I wound up at the scene at eleven o’clock on a freezing December morning, an hour after the place usually opened. The chocolate shop was chaos. The front doors were locked, with the three responding uniformed officers inside. Mike Harrigan, an old pro, was guarding the back door. Scott Grafton was drooling over a rack of chocolate Christmas candy, and Pete Clayton, the new hire, was at the front door. Crazed chocolate lovers stormed the place, oblivious to the falling snow. Jace shooed them away, and had Pete string up yellow crime scene tape.

          Maya Richards unlocked the door with shaking fingers, and let us in. I was familiar with the interior, thanks to my craving for sea-salt truffles. The decor hadn’t changed since 1890. Curlicued dark wood framed mirrors behind mahogany counters. The chocolates were displayed like jewels in beveled glass cases. The cases were empty today. Maya knew her shop wasn’t going to open for a while.

          Maya was about forty, wearing a chocolate-brown suit, the same color as her hair. Her face was pale as paper and her red lipstick looked like a bloody slash. Maya was shaking so badly, I was afraid she’d collapse. She was clearly in shock, and could barely talk.

          Jace was worried about her. He made sure Maya sat in a chair and called 911. I went back to find her a cup of coffee. I couldn’t find any, but there was plenty of the shop’s double-dark hot chocolate. I heated a mug in the microwave, and brought it to her. Maya wrapped her hands around the mug, and nodded. After a few sips, she recovered enough to talk. There were long pauses between her words, but she forced them out. Then the words tumbled out in a rush.

          “I . . . get . . . here . . . about seven . . . to set up the shop,” she said.

          “I have a very keen nose, and something didn’t smell right. I thought a squirrel might have gotten into the store and died. I checked everywhere, and finally decided the smell must be coming from upstairs.

          “Mr. Selwyn Skipton has the entire apartment upstairs. I thought he kept it as a second office, or a pied-à-terre for when he worked late downtown. He owns the building, you see, and he’s a regular customer. He loves our bear claws.”

          “Me, too,” I said. Jace frowned at me for interrupting.

          Maya took another sip of hot chocolate and kept talking. ‘I’ve never been upstairs in the apartment. Mr. Skipton’s kept it for years, and he likes – I mean, liked – his privacy. I was afraid he might have had some kind of accident. He has his own entrance in the back of the building, and I need a special key to open it. I also need a key to open the door at the top. The upstairs door was left unlocked.

          “I ran upstairs and knocked on the door. No one answered. I jiggled the handle and the door swung open. All I saw was this giant bed, covered in black satin, and Mr. Skipton in the middle of it. Dead. And naked. With bugs crawling on him!”

          Now Maya’s teeth were chattering. Her breathing was rapid and shallow and her skin was clammy. She set her mug on the floor.

          “Are you OK, Ms. Richards?” Jace asked.

          “I’m fine,” she said, and fainted.

          “See if she has any family, Angela,” Jace said. “I’ll call 911.”

          I found her cell phone and ran back. It needed the owner’s fingerprint to unlock it. I grabbed Maya’s limp hand, used her index finger to unlock the phone, scrolled down to an entry that said “Sis,” and called the number. Her sister Anita answered, and once I calmed her down, Anita said she’d leave her office and meet Maya at the hospital.

          “That’s the ambulance,” I told her, as the siren died with a squawk. Doors slammed. Pete opened the shop door, and four paramedics rushed in, bringing a blast of cold. Jace explained what happened. They checked Maya’s pulse. “Do you know if this has happened to her before?” the biggest paramedic asked. He looked like he bench-pressed Buicks.

          “No idea.” Jace shrugged.

          “It could be a panic attack,” the paramedic said, “but we’ll take her to the ER to make sure.”

          Jace asked Pete to stay with Maya at the hospital until her sister showed up. The young crew-cut mountain gave Jace a sour look and stomped out the door.

          I raised an eyebrow in surprise.

          “Pete’s got a bad attitude,” Jace said. “He tried to get hired by a big force, and wound up here. Thinks he’s too good to do scut work.”

          I nodded, and let it go. Some detectives wouldn’t have bothered taking care of Maya at a murder scene, but Jace had a kind heart.

          Meanwhile Mike, the responding officer, had set up the crime scene log. Jace and I gloved up, put on booties and trudged up the dark, narrow private staircase. I dragged my death investigator’s suitcase behind me.

          The apartment door was open from when Maya fled downstairs.

          Jace looked in and said, “Good lord.”

 

 

Elaine Viets ©2024

Elaine Viets has written 35 mysteries in four series. Her latest is A Scarlet Death: An Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery, published by Severn House in London. Elaine passed the Medicolegal Death Investigator Training Course given by St. Louis University’s School of Medicine. Deal with the Devil and 13 Short Stories is her collection of short stories. She’s won the Agatha, Anthony and Lefty Awards. Elaine will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Malice Domestic Mystery Conference in Bethesda, Maryland in April, 2024.

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: Murder Between the Covers: A Dead End Job Mystery by Elaine Viets

Bookblog of the Bristol Library: Murder Between the Covers: A Dead End Job Mystery ...:   Murder Between the Covers:   Dead End Job Mystery by Elaine Viets Reviewed by Jeanne Helen Hawthorne had it all: great job, lovely hom...

Guest Post: Excerpt: The Dead of Night by Elaine Viets

Please welcome author Elaine Viets back to the blog today as she shares the first chapter excerpt from her new book, The Dead of Night. This is the latest book in her Angela Richman, Death Investigator Mystery Series. The book comes out on Tuesday, April 4rthm  from Severn House.

 

The Dead of Night by Elaine Viets

                 

              Chapter 1

 

Like everyone who grew up in Chouteau Forest, Missouri, I knew the legend of the Cursed Crypt. The crypt was at Chouteau Forest University, one of the oldest academies in Missouri. The stories claimed that the restless spirit of a professor nicknamed Mean Gene Cortini had been causing death and destruction in the Forest for two centuries.

I’m Angela Richman, and I learned the legend of Mean Gene and the Cursed Crypt the same way many local teens did: around a campfire in the woods that gave the town of Chouteau Forest its name. When I first heard the tale, I was a gawky fifteen-year-old, the daughter of servants who worked on the Du Pres estate. I didn’t get many invitations to mingle with the cool kids, so when I was asked to join them, I sneaked out of the house one Saturday night to drink beer in a secluded part of the Forest.

It was a chilly March night, and the bare tree branches scraped together like old bones. I hated the bitter taste of the beer, but I wanted to adore my crush, high-school linebacker Danny Jacobs. The firelight turned Danny’s blond hair molten gold and highlighted his six-pack – the one under his tight T-shirt.

Alas, the only sparks that flew that night were from the crackling fire. Danny was devoted to the glamorous head cheerleader. He told us an ancient tale of adultery and betrayal, and we shivered in fear. All except the cheerleader, who was snuggled in Danny’s strong arms.

Here’s the tale, distilled from a thousand nights around local campfires:

The Cursed Crypt was a story of love gone wrong. What started as ordinary adultery unleashed two hundred years of plague, fire, floods and, finally, murder at Chouteau Forest University. The school was founded in 1820. The first president, Hiram Thaddeus Davis, was a grim, grave man with a grizzled beard and unforgiving eyes. He promised a well-rounded education in Latin, Greek, history, the Classics, mathematics and “moral philosophy.” Nobody knew what that was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The school was immediately successful. By 1822, the fledgling university was housed in a fine red-brick building and needed another professor.

Davis hired a brilliant scholar with a European pedigree, Eugene Franco Cortini, to teach Latin, Greek and biology. Cortini was devastatingly handsome, with thick black hair and sculpted features. He spoke five languages. He discovered two new species of American wild flowers – and named both after himself.

Cortini championed the theory of evolution long before Darwin. He wrote that Native Americans were really the lost tribes of Israel. And he preached that monogamy was “not a natural or healthy state for the animal kingdom.”

Cortini demonstrated his theory by having a passionate affair with Dolly, President Davis’s eighteen-year-old wife. Poor, balding Davis caught his curvy blonde wife in flagrante with Cortini, running her fingers through the professor’s thick black curls. Never mind where his hands were.

Cortini was fired on the spot, and banished from the campus. Before he left, he cursed the school on a dark windy night. Cortini stood in a circle of stones in front of the school, his hair wild and his black coat flaring, and shouted over the wind, “My Italian grandmother was a strega – a witch – and I inherited her powers. I am a streghone, a warlock. As long as I am banished from this school, death and disaster will fall upon it. As long as I am on the school grounds, it shall be safe.”

President Hiram Davis laughed while the pregnant Dolly Davis, imprisoned in her room, wept bitter tears. After cursing the school, the romantically handsome Cortini left for St. Louis, some forty miles east.

Two days after Cortini left, yellow fever struck the campus, carrying off six of its twenty students. Each month, another disaster hit the campus: lightning destroyed the huge oak in front of the school building. Disease killed the school’s milk cows. Chouteau Forest Creek flooded the fields where the school grew its crops.

Each time, President Davis dismissed these occurrences as unfortunate events and proudly declared that he “refused to give in to superstition.” He was a man of reason – until a fire broke out in the stables and killed his favorite black stallion.

That’s when President Davis invited Eugene Cortini to return to the campus. Cortini could no longer teach, but he was given a brick house to live in and conduct his research. The school flourished for seven years, and expanded to two buildings and a new dormitory.

Then Cortini died suddenly at age thirty-seven in 1845.

President Hiram Davis was taking no chances. He decreed that Cortini must be buried on campus, but he didn’t want the man’s grave on display. Cortini was buried in a crypt under the steps of the Main Building. His final resting place was hidden by a heavy iron door, but Cortini wasn’t forgotten. Students and staff whispered about the late Eugene Cortini, and noticed that Hiram Davis’s oldest son had thick black hair. Both his parents were blond.

Shortly after Cortini was in his crypt, President Davis died. But his school lived on, and so did the legend of Mean Gene Cortini. Every seven years, a disaster struck the school. The school tried to placate Cortini’s restless spirit by lining his crypt with marble. In 1857, a Victorian administration added a marble divan with a tasseled marble pillow, guarded by two weeping angels. A marble slab on the wall proclaimed the tomb was “Sacred to the memory of Eugene Franco Cortini, scholar, teacher, and researcher.”

These improvements didn’t work. The seven-year disaster cycle continued. While the school prospered, the legend lingered like a cloud over the campus.

More than a hundred years later, Chouteau Forest’s crafty one percent figured out how to make money out of the ancient tragedy. In the 1980s, the University Benefactors’ Club started auctioning off  “A Night in Mean Gene’s Cursed Crypt.”

The money went to benefit Chouteau Forest University, which soon had a fat endowment.

The prize was a big one: if any auction winner could stay the full night in the Cursed Crypt, they would be granted membership in the elite Chouteau Founders Club, which ran the Forest. The winners’ future in the Forest would be guaranteed.

So far, only one person had stayed the night in the gloomy crypt.

I was forty-one now, long past drinking beer while listening to ghost stories. I worked for the Chouteau County Medical Examiner’s office as a death investigator. That meant I was in charge of the body at the scene of a murder, an accident or an unexplained death. It had been more than a quarter of a century since I’d first heard the legend of Cursed Crypt in the night-struck woods, and I didn’t believe a word of it.

Until I saw the bodies.

 

Eliane Viets ©2023

Elaine Viets has written 34 bestselling mysteries in four series: hard-boiled Francesca Vierling, traditional Dead-End Job, and the cozy Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper novels. With her Angela Richman, Death Investigator forensic mysteries, Elaine returned to her hard-boiled roots. The Dead of Night is her newest Angela Richman mystery.

Elaine’s Deal with the Devil and 13 Short Stories was published by Crippen & Landru. She's been toastmaster and guest of honor at the Malice Domestic Mystery Conference. Elaine’s won the Agatha, Anthony and Lefty Awards and was shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers Award for best short story. www.elaineviets.com