Showing results by narrator "Michelle Babb" in All Categories

The Will Travel for Trouble series: short cozy mysteries featuring Minnie Crockwell, recreational vehicle (RV) enthusiast, and her ghost traveling companion, Peregrine Ebenezer (Ben) Alford, as they travel across the United States, discovering murder and mayhem along the way.

A holiday novella. The Shoemakers and Ferraros plan to spend Christmas in Texas with Larry and Jane Ann's brother and then take a camping trip through the Southwest. But those plans are stopped cold when they hit a rogue ice storm in Missouri and they end up snowbound in a campground. And that's just the beginning.

A biking and camping trip to southeastern Minnesota turns into double trouble for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends as she deals with a canoeing mishap and a couple of bodies. Strange happenings in the campground, the nearby nature learning center, and an old power plant complicate the suspect pool and Frannie tries to stay out of it - really - but what can she do? After all, she is only curious, but sometimes it isn't just cats who have trouble with that!

Ben is enthralled with tales of the Old West, and Minnie promises him a trip to Tombstone, home of the Gunfight at the OK Corral and Boothill Graveyard! Shortly after setting out her pink flamingos at Tombstone Tommy’s RV Park, Minnie meets a fellow female RVer who invites herself along on the outing. But a reenactment gunfight gone terribly wrong and the disappearance of her new friend, Kathy, threaten to ruin Minnie’s plans for fun under the sun.

Abby Thomas is spending the summer in a run-down old house with a bratty pre-teen named Merrideth she is supposed to tutor. Not a dream job. But it does come with perks. There's John Roberts, a devastatingly attractive neighbor who is almost too wonderful to be real. And there's the new computer program Beautiful Houses - also too amazing to be real. No one knows how it works, but with it she can rewind and fast-forward the lives of all the people who ever lived in the house, including Charlotte Miles.

Frannie and Larry Shoemaker love taking their grandchildren, Sabet and Joe, camping with them. But at Bluffs State Park, Frannie finds herself worrying more than usual about their safety, and when another young girl disappears from the campground in broad daylight, her fears increase. The fun of a bike ride, a flea market, marshmallow guns, and a storyteller are quickly overshadowed. Accusations against Larry and her add to the cloud over their heads. Frannie begins to puzzle out the mystery.

Only two seasons matter in Coho Bay, Alaska - cruise ship and winter. Caribou King, owner of The Broken Antler Gallery, is hip-deep in tourists when her old college pal Taylor shows up asking for refuge, saying she has no place else to go. Cara is cautious; Taylor was the wife of one of Alaska's most renowned artists, Jonathan Snow, who was mauled to death by a bear the previous year. Why would his widow want to return to the location of her tragic loss? Something about Taylor's story just doesn't ring true.

When Anne's mother agrees to marry a wealthy, mysterious man, she expects a nice mansion in the hills. But their new home, Belrose Abbey, is more like a castle - imposing, cold, and full of shadows. The more Anne explores the corridors and vacant rooms and dusty crannies, the more she discovers about the abbey's master - her soon-to-be stepfather - Ivan Helsburg. As her mother's wedding draws closer, Anne begins to harbor a creeping suspicion that all is not well at Belrose Abbey.

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby's twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea, while mother Tabby, who also struggles with addiction, lies inebriated on the living room floor.

When shadow-monsters attack in the cafeteria, eighth grader Penny Preston panics, starts a food fight, and unknowingly creates a trans-dimensional rift. Summoned to the counselor’s office, she expects suspension, but instead discovers that she exists in more than three dimensions. Unless she immediately begins training to learn to handle her powerful abilities, she risks losing her sanity. Together with Simon, her telepathic multidimensional cat, Penny struggles to save her relationship with her best friend, protect her universe, and uncover her connection to Arthurian myth.

Murder, mystery meat, and morning sickness! Hudson and Lovita are expecting, and she's having trouble keeping food down for the first time in her life. Her best friend, Sue Jan, is busy juggling mommyhood. The Crown of Glory Beauty Salon and Boutique is busier than a one-toothed man in a corn-on-the-cob-eating contest. Things are great until a handsome law intern disappears after an argument with their top stylist's once-upon-a-time wayward son.

Alaskan fine arts dealer Caribou King has closed up shop for the season and is looking forward to a peaceful winter, capped off by the birth of her sister's first child. When she discovers the body of Angela Nash, an elderly woman, in the old Tilamu house, Cara can't help poking her nose into the investigation. When Alex Tilamu shows up at Mrs. Nash's funeral, drunk and ranting about murder, Cara is convinced there is more at stake than a dilapidated house on the edge of the bay.

In the time it takes for a villain to breathe his last, Anne and her mother, Dauphine, suddenly inherit Belrose Abbey -- a gothic castle set on a monstrous estate, complete with devious servants, mysterious forests, and the darkest of secrets. The more they settle into their new home, the more unsettling the house becomes. What do all the unmarked graves mean? Where are all the people who had arrived on the estate but then vanished? And could there really be an abandoned insane asylum on the property?

Eight-grader Penny Preston thought she knew how to handle the Bodach, the spirits from the fifth dimension. But suddenly something is attacking the structure of the multiverse. Left unchecked, the attack will tear the fabric separating the dimensions and destroy the universe in a cataclysmic cosmic crunch. As the stress on the fabric grows, higher-dimensional energy escapes into Piper Falls, NY, reenergizing the Bodach. Emboldened, they use their regained powers to wreak havoc on the small town. The extra energy draws several new higher-dimensional entities to Piper Falls.

When Penny solves the riddle of an unbreakable knot in time, she unwittingly releases two time-travelers from the distant past into Piper Falls. The town is plagued by a series of baffling events related to the appearance of a strange elf-like creature. Penny's science teacher and mentor, Mr. Myrdin, recognizes him as the Coch Coblyn, an evil spirit from Celtic myth with a penchant for igniting city destroying fires.

Settling into her new condominium on Mirror Pond, novelist Sallie Chilcoat feels lost in Ashburn, Virginia, after moving to the state for love of a man. But with the end of that relationship, she finds herself at loose ends. She stares out the window at the pond and contemplates learning to kayak...or taking up painting...or climbing Mount Everest. Movement in the overwater gazebo catches her eye, and she grabs up her people-watching binoculars to see a man sitting inside the gazebo playing an accordion.

With her wedding to Hudson just months away, all Lovita's plans seem to be going awry. A crooked politician is running for mayor, his girlfriend is opening a new beauty shop, and the contractor building Sue Jan and Monroe's dream home is found dead. To top it all off, the money from the high school band's fundraiser has disappeared. Before Lovita walks down the aisle, the girls have to nail a killer, uncover missing band fundraiser money, save their beauty shop, and rescue the town of Wachita. Piece of cake.

A trip down memory lane is fine if you don't stumble on a body. Frannie Shoemaker and her friends camp at Old Dam Trail State Park near one of Donna Nowak's childhood homes. They take in the county....

A cozy/thriller mystery! The starry skies over New Mexico, the "Land of Enchantment", may hold secrets of their own. The Shoemakers and the Ferraros, on an extended camping trip, find themselves picking up a souvenir they don't want and taking sidetrips they didn't plan on.

Over 200 years ago, famed explorer Meriwether Lewis died on the Natchez Trace under mysterious circumstances. Historians still argue whether it was suicide or murder. That shouldn't affect a weekend campout in the present day for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends, but it does. They meet interesting characters at a mountain man rendezvous and get mixed up as usual with the strange goings-on. Because camping can be murder!