For L.A.’s most uncertain private investigator (and old movie buff) Dave Beauchamp, attending the Hollywood Celebrity Expo should have been Heaven. But it wasn’t, particularly when the show’s stars started turning up dead in highly unusual and personal ways. Before long, Dave finds himself struggling to make sense out of a bizarre case that appears rooted in an unsolved string of murders from the 1980s. Both grippingly suspenseful and laugh-out-loud funny, Dead and In Person! demonstrates that in the real La-La-Land, vintage Hollywood and vintage secrets can sometimes go hand-in-hand in disturbing and deadly ways. PRAISE FOR MICHAEL MALLORY’S “DAVE BEAUCHAMP” SERIES: “When author Michael Mallory doesn’t have the readers smiling at his clever asides and observations, he’ll have them laughing out loud.” --Robert S. Levinson, bestselling author of The Stardom Affair. “Take a befuddled Hollywood detective whose very name most people can’t pronounce correctly, and set him on the trail of a murderer...and you have the making of a darkly comedic romp.” --Robert Masello, TV writer and bestselling author of The Jekyll Revelation. “You get two for the price of one, a funny romp and a mystery, with a little Hollywood dish thrown in. What more you could ask for?” --Paul D. Marks, Shamus Award-winning author of White Heat.

It starts for movie buff Dave Beauchamp, L.A.'s most hapless P.I., when the tomato walks into his office. At least that’s how she's dressed. But the woman in the tomato suit is not what she seems...and the restaurant she's promoting, which is owned by a powerful religious cult, harbors a deadly secret. "Aided" by the voices of classic film stars inside his head, Dave struggles to disentangle a web of corruption and murder, or die trying. Both suspenseful and laugh-out-loud funny, Eats to Die For! proves you don't have to be crazy to live in L.A....but it doesn't hurt.

Even by Hollywood standards, Nora Frost is the stage mother from Hell. Her futile drive to turn her talentless twin sons into child superstars has left figurative bodies strewn throughout Los Angeles. But after Nora hires hapless young private detective Dave Beauchamp to investigate a letter threatening the brothers, the body count begins to mount. It's up to Dave (a recovering lawyer and serious movie buff) to discover why people connected to Nora's crusade are turning up dead, and why someone has kidnapped the twins. The real question, though, is whether Dave is up to the job, even with the unsolicited "advice" he constantly receives from the old-time movie stars sounding off in his head! KILL THE MOTHER! is a laugh-out-loud mystery adventure that spotlights some of the wackier corners of Hollywood, as seen through the eyes of a new, unique P.I., whose motto is: "If you can’t be insane in L.A., where can you?"

The secret double-life of Ruth Ellis and the Establishment cover-up that led to her unjust hanging Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, was convicted fifty years ago for shooting her lover David Blakely. The case became a notorious part of British criminal history and was turned into the film, Dance with a Stranger. The story that has been perpetuated ever since is that of a peroxide tart who killed in a fit of passion. Yet, crucial questions were left unasked in the original trial. Ruth Ellis's sister, Muriel Jakubait, knew her longest of all. She has never given up her search for justice. Now after fifty years she has decided to reveal the hard facts about their shared upbringing, and seek to piece together the full true story of her sister. As she is at pains to point out, the jealous killer tag has never been substantiated. This is a story of power, espionage, lies, loyalty, poverty, sex and betrayal. It suggests a third man may have pulled the trigger for the fatal shots. And that he belonged to a web of espionage into which Ruth Ellis fell long before the shooting. Above all, it indicates that Ruth was being run by Stephen Ward, at least a decade before his name became public in the Profumo Scandal. Muriel's motive is about more than proving her sister Ruth's innocence. It's about reclaiming the right to tell the story of her own family, stripped bare of the many tabloid myths that have accrued over the decades. She shows that Ruth was somebody damaged at a very early age - who strove to make something of herself, only to be caught up in something much bigger and end up paying with her life.

The skeletal remains of an infant are found in the walls of a stately home under renovation. The house, located in New Bedford, MA, had been built by the Whaling Captain Anthony Spooner in the mid 1800s. Daniel OMalley, Chief Homicide Inspector, and his newly appointed detective, William Normandin, unearth evidence as far away as upstate New York. The previous occupants of the house included the dowager Abigail Spooner. Inspector OMalley discovers that her son, Lieutenant Mortimer, presently serving on the USS Little in the South Pacific had exhibited strange and disturbing behaviors as a young man. During the time of the investigation members of the Lepage family volunteer to serve in the European and Pacific theaters of World War II. This large extended French-Canadian family comes from the wooden three-decker section of the city, adjacent to the thriving mills that now provide the economic engine for the city of New Bedford. One of the Lepages befriends a depressed Lieutenant Mortimer who awaits surgery to remove shrapnel from his spine, an injury that the Lieutenant had sustained when his ship was sunk by Japanese forces off Guadalcanal. This friendship between two persons of very different backgrounds assists the Lieutenant in facing his surgery and subsequent rehabilitation with bravery. Revelations are shared between them.

An unwelcome guest - Death - gatecrashes a society wedding and Lord Francis Powerscourt is summoned by his barrister friend, Charles Augustus Pugh, to investigate this most singular case of murder in the Fens. The dead man is Randolph Colville, successful wine merchant and father of the groom. The murderer would appear to be his brother Cosmo, found in the same room with a gun in his hand. But is this simply a modern-day version of Cain and Abel, or is there more to it than that? Cosmo isn't speaking and time is running out for him for he has an appointment with the gallows in two weeks. Francis has to act fast and sets out to discover all he can about the dead man - and his brother. Cosmo's silence is bothering him for it can only be for two reasons; either he is protecting a woman - or a family scandal. His investigations take him to the vineyards and towns of Burgundy, where he uncovers evidence of serious malpractise in the Colville wine trade, bitter rivalry with a London-based competitor and a disgruntled ex-employee bent on revenge. But there is another secret - more terrible and shocking than anything gone on before - which finally reveals the motive for the untimely death of a wine merchant. Praise for David Dickinson: 'Splendid entertainment' Publishers Weekly 'A leisurely period whodunit with Dickinson's customary historical tidbits and patches of local color, swathed in an appealing Victorian narrative' Kirkus Reviews 'Detective fiction in the grand style' James Naughtie 'A cracking yarn, beguilingly real from start to finish' Peter Snow

This book examines adaptations of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories in film, radio and television. Part One covers adaptations prior to 2013, including portrayals by Alec Guinness, Kenneth More, and others, as well as German and Italian versions. Part Two focuses on the BBC series Father Brown, launched in 2013 with Mark Williams starring in the title role. It provides information about the series' creation and production along with a helpful episode guide, and it analyzes critical and audience responses to the show.

Secret Histories claims that the history of the nation is hidden—in plain sight—within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a "secret history" that cuts beneath the "straight histories" of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining "double consciousness" in the post–Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy. Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls "overpassing to love." Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.