Elaine Viets

"Shhh...in the newest hardcover in the national bestselling Dead-End Job Mystery series, Helen Hawthorne quietly goes undercover at a local library to search for a missing masterpiece. Wealthy socialite Elizabeth Cateman Kingsley has hired Helen to find a missing John Singer Sargent painting, owned by her late father. After his death, many of Davis Cateman's books were donated to the Flora Park library, and his daughter suspects the small watercolor-worth...

"Everyone in Chouteau Forest knows the legend of the Cursed Crypt. It's claimed that the restless spirit of a professor nicknamed Mean Gene Cortini, buried in Chouteau Forest University's crypt, has been causing death and destruction in the Forest for almost two centuries. Local residents are used to disease and natural disasters striking every seven years. But not murder. When Trey Lawson outbids the wealthy Du Pres family at the university's annual...

In the exclusive, gated enclave of Olympia Forest Estates, death investigator Angela Richman watches a mansion go up in a fiery blaze. With it, seventy-year-old financier Luther Delor, a drunken, bed-hopping rhinestone cowboy. Embroiled in a bitter divorce, Delor may have scandalized Chouteau Forest, but his murder has united it against the accused: Delor's twenty-year-old girlfriend, Kendra Salvato, an "outsider." With an engagement ring bigger than...

Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show she humiliates three homeless women, fires her entourage and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch. She collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, but she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA. On the...

Until his Porsche careened off the road killing him instantly and not leaving much of him behind, Sterling Chaney was an influential member of Chouteau Forest -- home of the one percenters. As the eulogies at his funeral commence, an unexpected guest interrupts...Sterling. The story attracts widespread media coverage. Sterling's the man who showed up late for his own funeral. He revels in the spotlight, until it's revealed he earned his fortune...

The one thing celebrity Trish Barrymore and her no account accountant husband, Mort, can agree on in their bitter divorce is shared cat custody. But when Mort is found brained by a mahogany cat tower, and Justine, their pedigreed Chartreux show cat, goes missing, Trish calls on Helen and Phil. Despite a ransom note from the catnapper, Trish is still the prime murder suspect in the eyes of the police. As they await the post Mortem, it's up to Helen...

"The last thing Chouteau County death investigator Angela Richman wants to do during the holidays is her job. So it’s with some trepidation that she agrees to help the desperate Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche when they show up on her doorstep. Their daughter Juliet is missing. She was last seen leaving a high school party just before midnight, and they’d like Angela’s help getting their trusted local detectives involved. The officer assigned to the case―Chouteau...