In Arsenic with Austen, widowed Emily Cavanaugh’s great aunt Beatrice leaves her a Victorian mansion, a fat bank account, and half the real estate in the (fictional) Oregon coastal town of Stony Beach. Emily’s return to the setting of her childhood summer vacations also brings the return of her first love, Lieutenant Sheriff Luke Richards. As they work together to uncover the real story behind Beatrice’s death, Emily and Luke rekindle their thirty-year-old romance, and Emily decides to retire from her college teaching job and relocate to Stony Beach permanently.
Unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with her newfound wealth, Emily determines to turn her mansion, Windy Corner, into an invitation-only retreat center for writers, with each bedroom themed around a different classic author. She hires a local teenage single mother, Katie, as housekeeper, and Emily’s friend and colleague Marguerite helps to recruit the guests.
But to Emily’s dismay, over the course of the following months (and novels), Windy Corner and Stony Beach become the sites of a series of troubling murders, each of which brings to Emily’s mind some connection with a classic author. She uses this knowledge to help Luke bring the murderers to justice.
The series moves to Emily’s old college in Portland for Death with Dostoevsky, then to Oxfordshire for Luke and Emily’s honeymoon in Fatality with Forster, then back home to Stony Beach in Hanging with Hugo.
(In case you’re curious about the alpha order, there is no “E” book because the pandemic hit at that time and was so stressful I couldn’t face writing a book themed around the rather doleful George Eliot. “I” was going to be a tongue-in-cheek short story called “Iocaine with Ionescu,” but I never got around to writing it.)
You can find the previous volumes of the series at your favorite online retailer, or order them from your local bricks-and-mortar store, or request signed copies from me.
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