Henrie O Series

“Three cheers for Henrie O, an intelligent, engaging sleuth!”–Mary Higgins Clark

When retired newspaper reporter Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, Henrie O to her friends, receives a call for help, she discovers that love once kindled never burns to ashes. Although she refused Jimmy Lennox’s marriage proposal, there is still a special place for him in her heart. She wished him well when he found happiness with Sophia Montgomery, world-famous documentary filmmaker and stepmother to the now grown heirs of a great fortune. Sophia is at odds with the heirs, and Jimmy fears for her safety. He asks Henrie O to come along with the family on a Baltic cruise. Henrie O can’t turn down her old friend, though old passions are stirred when he calls.

On the voyage she soon realizes this dysfunctional family is plunging toward destruction and one of the travelers has murder in mind. As the ports of call pass–Copenhagen, Gdynia, Tallinn, St. Petersburg–death inexorably approaches. Henrie O works desperately to save Jimmy and to bring hope to lives blighted by anger, resentment, and heartbreak.

Henrietta Collins’s talent for troubleshooting and her zest for life are much needed at a family gathering in Bermuda, where murder prowls the halls of a luxury hotel. Henrie O has come to the island with her grandchildren for the remarriage of their father, Lloyd Drake. He plans to marry Connor Bailey, a beautiful widow with a dark past and a knack for attracting men. Only a year earlier, the resort manager’s husband fell from a tower to his death after quarreling with Connor. It now seems that his restless spirit is haunting the hotel—and perhaps seeking revenge. Henrie O has no patience for bogus supernatural appearances, but when she sets out to unmask the “ghost’s” creator, she realizes how much is at stake.

“Cheers for Henrie O, an intelligent, engaging sleuth!”—Mary Higgins Clark
 
Henrie O is looking forward to a quiet holiday. Instead, the ex-journalist turned sleuth awakens in a Tennessee mountain cabin to discover her friend’s nephew, his shirt stained with blood, his handsome face stricken by fear and horror.

Craig Matthews swears he didn’t kill his wife, swears he didn’t lure Patty Kay out to the playhouse of their lavish Fair Haven estate and leave her bloodied and dead. Why, then did he run away? It’s a question that draws Henrie O into the thick of a life-and-death drama, into the lives of Fair Haven’s best families, and into a world where wealth and privilege mask a hotbed of sex, lies, and desperation.
 
Only when Henrie O begins to question the motives of the bereaved widower, the sullen nymphet of a daughter, the irresistible ex-husband, the venomous sister, even the ingratiating schoolmaster of the exclusive school where Patty Kay was a trustee, does the truth start to emerge. But when another corpse turns up, Henrie O knows time is running out. Now she must untangle this deadly web—or become the next victim of a mind bent on murder.

“A sassy heroine . . . [Henrie O] says what she thinks (when it serves her purposes) and pulls no punches.”—Chicago Sun-Times
 
When arrogant media magnate Chase Prescott is nearly killed by a box of cyanide-laced candy, he dials his long-ago lover, retired newshound Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, with a simple request: He’ll assemble all the suspects if Henrie O will kindly point out the would-be murderer.
 
It’s a case—her first—that fills Henrie O with grave misgivings, especially when she arrives on Chase’s private island off the South Carolina coast to meet the players in this deadly drama. Among Prescott’s unstable young wife, his sullen stepson, and his toady of a secretary, she has trouble narrowing the field of suspects—even when a second attempt is made on Chase’s life. As Henrie O unearths a will and fascinating new evidence, a killer hurricane sweeps up from Cuba, threatening to maroon them in this vacation hell . . . where the trappings of luxury are put to lethal use and the secrets of the past have the power to engulf them all.