Description
FIVE-ALARM FIRE
“Are you the person who normally checks the kiln?”
I started. He’d pronounced it “kill,” like a lot of people do.
Normally, we didn’t have a kill to check.
Crabby is how detective-in-training Cat Caliban has felt ever since menopause hit and her friends think she can work off her aggressions pounding clay in a beginners’ pottery class. But someone has mistaken Cat’s pot for a blunt instrument and they’re firing something besides clay in the art center kiln. Now that things are really heating up, Cat’s detective work leads to a legendary lost collection of vases from Rookwood Pottery, Cincinnati’s famed art pottery — a collection once owned by an equally legendary madam from one of the city’s most exclusive houses of prostitution before the First World War.
SIX FEET UNDER
After a career fighting crime, six little words still have the power to strike fear in the heart of a retired cop: the sleep-over is at your house.
Once the jump-rope queen of Cincinnati, Rocky Zacharias is now an ex-convict with kids of her own. And she’s disappeared, leaving behind a cryptic call for help. With Rocky and her kids in the path of a killer, detective-in-training Cat Caliban and retired juvenile officer Moses Fogg decide that the clue to Rocky’s danger may be locked up behind the razor wire of the Women’s Correctional Institution, so Cat goes inside to learn the truth before someone puts Rocky six feet under — and before Cat and Moses send Rocky’s kids into Time Out and throw away the key.
SEVENTH DEADLY SIN
Take it from me, Cat Caliban: if someone who looks and sounds like me, with or without picklocks, ever shows up in answer to your prayers, you’d better have a serious heart-to-heart with your maker.
It’s Valentine’s Day and love is in the air at the Catatonia Arms. Detective-in-training Cat Caliban disapproves of her tenants’ lovers, but is distracted by the case of a murdered teenager found in the river with a rope around his neck. Her investigations lead her to a computer club at an evangelical ministry, where the star attraction is a chimp named Evie, who turns out to be the smartest and most humane member of the congregation. But what Evie knows, she can’t tell.
EIGHT MILES HIGH
Maybe you think I was replaying this conversation in my head after I yanked the ripcord. Maybe you think that after the parachute jerked me up and after the pain in my near-dislocated shoulders subsided into a steady ache, I applied my investigative faculties to the case at hand while drifting earthward like a fallen leaf, thinking, “This is quite a two-pipe problem.”
The WASP flew dangerous missions in every aircraft the Army owned, from single-engine trainers to sophisticated bombers. Yet their planes were sabotaged. They were savaged in the press and denounced on the floor of Congress. They were awarded no medals and no veterans benefits. Thirty-eight of them died in service to their country. Now, four decades later, someone is killing off the survivors. Cat and Moses must discover who and why, and Cat is determined to do her investigating with both feet firmly planted on the ground.
