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Alice Nestleton Mystery Series

Lydia Adamson
A Cat With no Clue by Lydia Adamson
A Cat With a Fiddle by Lydia Adamson
A Cat in the Wings by Lydia Adamson

Alice Nestleton Mystery Series : Titles in Order

Book 19
Actress and amateur sleuth Alice Nestleton thinks up the perfect anniversary gift for her elderly actor friends Alex and Lila. She has a chef whip up a replica of the meal the couple shared on their first date. For better or worse, they eat every bite. The next day, they’re dead—from food poisoning. Of course, the only witnesses are the couple’s two little kittens. Definitely cute, but certainly not viable on the witness stand. To say that Alice is the prime suspect would be an extreme understatement. And while the actor in Alice may love the spotlight, this is not the kind of attention she needs.
Book 6
Available Digitally for the First Time

A holiday in rural Massachusetts seems like just the thing for talented actress turned cat-sitter Alice Nestleton—until a killer strikes a sour note…

Alice Nestleton has recently died… at the box office, that is. Her latest play bombed, and the critics gleefully skewered her performance in the reviews. Instead of going to the dogs, Alice has returned to a kinder, gentler profession—cat-sitting. Her current assignment is to deliver an adorable Scottish-fold kitty named Lulu to her owner at a remote Massachusetts artists’ colony. To Alice’s relief, the woods are lovely, dark, and deep—too bad the visiting world-famous quartet isn’t as charming…especially when their handsome ladykiller of a pianist turns up murdered.

Alice may have a tin ear, but she possesses a sharp eye for suspects and a nose for clues. Now, the paw prints are on the wall, and Alice has a good idea whodunit. But the local police won’t listen, and soon the intrepid cat-lady is baiting a dangerous mousetrap for a killer who’s not just pussy-footing around…


Be sure to look for A Cat Tells Two Tales, available October 2012 in trade paperback from Obsidian.
Book 5
Available Digitally for the First Time

Murder takes a bow at the ballet, and cat-sitting sleuth Alice Nestleton pirouettes into danger…

An actress led into a life of crime (sleuthing, that is) and cat-sitting, Alice Nestleton has returned to the theater—dozing in a box seat through a Lincoln Center production of The Nutcracker. She’s happily imagining her Main Coon cat, Bushy, and all-American alley cat, Pancho, doing the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy when her reverie is interrupted by some off-stage excitement—the discovery of former ballet great Peter Dobrynin dressed like a derelict and dead as a doornail.

And when the murder is pinned on her close friend, Lucia, Alice starts snooping for clues among New York’s homeless to find the real killer. From flop houses to the elegant salons of wealthy art patrons, Alice is drawn into a dark, dangerous dance of deception…until a mysterious cat drags in the shocking solution to this pas de deux with death.

Curl up with A Cat Tells Two Tales, available October 2012 in trade paperback from Obsidian.
Book 4
A catnip garden yields a bumper crop of murder for actress-turned-sleuth Alice Nestleton…

Alice Nestleton, beautiful off-off Broadway actress-turned-amateur-detective, has been forced into a life of crime—sleuthing that is—with some cat-sitting on the side. But this hot summer in New York she has taken a hiatus from stage and scene-of-the-crime to join a coterie of cat-lovers in cultivating a Manhattan herb garden. Unfortunately, a party to celebrate their first crop of peppermint tea ends with one of their group going right off the edge—of a 25th-floor terrace. Alice is stunned and grief stricken at the apparent suicide. But aided and abetted by her two cats, she soon smells a rat. And the help of her own feline-like instincts, the gorgeous gumshoe discovers that the victim’s dearest friends may well have been her most murderous enemies…

Be sure to look for A Cat Tells Two Tales, available October 2012 in trade paperback from Obsidian.
Book 3
Available Digitally for the First Time

A cat, a mouse, and two corpses equal a menagerie of murder for actress turned cat-sitting sleuth Alice Nestleton…

Dubbed “one of Manhattan’s finest little-known actresses,” beautiful cat-sitter turned sleuth Alice Nestleton has been called into action again. This time the New York City cops have put her onto a case that’s right up her alley. It begins when a routine murder investigation uncovers a string of clues that tie up fifteen years of unsolved homicides.

The common thread: a cat-loving serial killer who preys on feline owners, whisks away the startled pet, and leaves a mouse toy at the scene as his calling card. This is enough to put Alice hot on the trail for more clues—a trail that moves from the secretive small towns of the Adirondacks, to the pages of a book of nursery rhymes, to the eerie caverns of Central Park. There Alice finds herself face to face with a mysterious cult whose devotees dabble in cat-worship—and murder.


Curl up with A Cat Tells Two Tales, available October 2012 in trade paperback from Obsidian.
Book 2
Available Digitally for the First Time.

A mystery cat takes talented actress-turned-sleuth Alice Nestleton behind the scenes—for murder…

Beautiful Off-Off Broadway actress-sleuth Alice Nestleton gasps as a sinister shadow looms at the top of her apartment house stairs. But it’s only a moonstruck student from her acting class who comes bearing a gift—a gorgeous white Abyssinian-like cat. That is strange enough, but stranger still, just days later the young Lothario is killed in a Manhattan bar…and the exotic kitty is cat-napped!

Alice’s own two cats, the regal Bushy and the harum-scarum Pancho, have helped her catch criminals before. But the trap she devises to corner the perpetrator of the cat theft may entangle her instead in a dead actor’s secrets and murderous drama—of love and revenge…



Curl up with a copy of A Cat Tells Two Tales, available October 2012 in trade paperback from Obsidian.
Book 1
This Christmas, in the newest Alice Nestleton Mystery, Alice will discover that cat-sitting can be murder…

Off-Off Broadway actress-turned-sleuth Alice Nestleton is just crazy about cats, particularly her Maine coon cat Bushy and zany alleycat Pancho. Now she’s hoping for a merry little Christmas peacefully cat-sitting at a sprawling Long Island estate, where she expects to be greeted by eight howling Himalayans.

Instead, she finds herself face to bloody face with a grisly corpse. Alice has unwittingly stepped into a deadly conspiracy of high-stakes horse racing, sinister seduction, and missing cash. She knows she’d better count on her cat’s clever instincts and nine lives, since her own curiosity has landed her just a whisker away from death…

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