Edisto Island Mysteries

A big city detective. A lowcountry murder. Peace, safety, a place to grieve and heal. After her husband is murdered by the Russian mob, Boston detective Callie Jean Morgan comes home to South Carolina. Her father hands her the keys to Chelsea Morning, the family beach house. There, she can keep their teenage son, Jeb, away from further threats. The sand, the waves, the ocean breezes ought to help them heal. But the day they arrive at Edisto Beach, Callie finds her childhood mentor and elderly neighbor murdered. He was everything to her in her tender years. But she swore off law enforcement, and she tells herself she had to raise her son and stay away from the criminal element. It's what hurt her family to begin with. However, taunted by the killer, who repeatedly violates her home and threatens others in the community, Callie finds her new sanctuary has become her old nightmare. Despite warnings from the town's police chief, Callie plunges back into detective work, pursuing a sinister stranger who may have ties to her past. He's turning a quiet paradise into a paranoid patch of sand where nobody's safe. She never thought she be back in the middle of a murder investigation, but she has no choice. Unfortunately, she'll do whatever it takes to stop him. She has no patience for murderers.

Is it a flesh and blood killer-or restless spirits? According to Sophie the psychic and local yoga instructor, beautiful Edisto Beach becomes a hotbed of troublemaking spirits every August whether anybody believes her or not. But when a visitor dies mysteriously during a beach house party, former big-city detective Callie Morgan and Edisto Beach police chief Mike Seabrook hunt for motives and suspects among the living. A local ghost story holds potential for murder. With tourists filling the beach and amateur sleuths finding their vacation more thrilling, a few start getting underfoot. Local business owners become anxious to squelch rumors of a murderer on the loose. Then things turn dark when Callie realizes maybe she needs all the help she can get once the killer's attention turns toward her.

Murder came in with the tide . . . Edisto Island is a paradise where people escape from the mainstream world. Yet for newly sworn-in Edisto Police Chief Callie Jean Morgan, the trouble has just begun . . . When a rookie officer drowns in a freak crash in the marsh, Callie almost dies herself trying to save him. Her instincts tell her it wasn't an accident. Suspects and clues mount, and Callie's outlandish mother complicates the investigation. Callie's long-time friendship with Officer Mike Seabrook takes a turn toward something new-but is shadowed by the unsolved mystery of his wife's death. Everyone's past rises to the surface, nobody on the same sheet of music, entangling with death that ultimately cuts to the bone. The roar of the surf made Callie's steps soundless, her thoughts louder. Two and a half weeks on the job, and she'd lost an officer. Edisto hadn't sacrificed an officer in its entire history, and the first female chief had to be the one to break the record. She sniffled. Salty breezes began to clear her sinuses, but nothing could assuage the guilt clinging to her like the muggy air Sarah lived. Francis died. And somebody had to be disappointed at that freakish turn of events, because she suspected it was meant to be the other way around. Crime was for people who lived across the big bridge on the mainland. But whether the natives liked it or not, the brake lines were cut on Edisto. She didn't want to go down that path, but one of them might be a frustrated, unfulfilled killer.

A cold case heats up . . . A dead man in Big Bay Creek, spring break, and a rogue FBI agent would be enough to drive Chief Callie Jean Morgan to drink . . . if she hadn't already quietly crawled inside a bottle of gin to drown her sorrows over a life ripped apart by too many losses. While her son and fellow officers wonder how to help, how to keep her from losing her mind, she'd thrown an investigation she has little desire to solve. But when her investigation into the stranger's death heats up an unsolved abduction case, Callie finds herself pitted against the town council, her son, the agent, and even the raucous college kids enjoying idyllic Edisto Beach. Amidst it all, Callie must find a way to reconcile her grief and her precious taste for gin before anyone else is killed. It's on her now. . . her and her alone. Those who used to help her are gone.

A Callie Morgan and Carolina Slade crossover! A new plantation B&B opens on Edisto Island, and Police Chief Callie Morgan of the town of Edisto Beach reluctantly checks it out as a formality of her job. But when a renowned-and now dead-travel blogger washes ashore on the banks of Indigo Plantation, she reluctantly agrees to head the investigation as a favor to the county sheriff, whose reasons are as questionable as the death itself. But she's forced to work with a rather strong-armed county detective, a vacationing federal agent, and the agent's girlfriend, a spitfire of an investigator who works for, of all places, the Department of Agriculture. It's a cadre of oddities on Edisto Island, both in B&B employees and the collection of investigators researching a murder that is equally as odd. Because poison is growing on this plantation, and someone knows how to use it well.

When the discovery of a body on a vacant lot puts an end to Police Chief Callie Morgan's surprise birthday party, Christmas week loses some of its charm. Not only does she know the dead man, he's a relation . . . of sorts. Soon she's juggling a murder investigation and a rash of burglaries that may have been committed by the mythical Edisto Santa-a holiday secret Santa, who may have taken a page from Robin Hood's book and begun robbing from the tourist rich and giving to the local poor. Since the suspects for both crimes are Edisto residents, no matter how delicately Callie treads, this holiday season will pit Callie against her beloved Edisto and leave her feeling like the Grinch, Scrooge, and Old Man Potter rolled into one. But she has no choice. Murder trumps Santa. This year Callie is making a list and checking it twice.

Planning a reunion is going to get someone killed. . . Edisto Beach Police Chief Callie Morgan has no desire to relive her senior year and the nightmare of a murder and a suicide that shook her high school to its core. But when the reunion committee convenes on Edisto Beach for a planning retreat, she has no choice. Every person on the committee could be a suspect in the unsolved murder, and one classmate, now a bestselling author, threatens to weave them into a tell-all true crime novel. Until she disappears the first night of the committee retreat. Callie must sort fact from fiction in a race against the clock to find a cold case murderer who may have just killed again.

Fire steals her breath and took her husband years ago, but Edisto Beach Police Chief Callie Morgan will have to face the flames again when an arsonist stalks the beach. One fire could be carelessness, but three? Trouble is, the all-too-easy suspect may be an intellectually disabled young man who idolizes her in particular and law enforcement in general. With the town unsettled by the fires and a string of breaking-and-entering crimes, they're screaming for closure. They want someone's head on a spike, and Callie must fight against time and popular opinion to unearth the real arsonist, who is clearly willing to kill. Her island is angry, scared, and looking to her for answers. If she doesn't find them, Callie will be forced to pay a price.

Regret has become ex-Police Chief Callie Jean Morgan's constant companion. Her half-assed, "good ol' boy" replacement in the town of Edisto deepens her guilt at having abandoned her citizens, her officers. When her friends Carolina Slade and Wayne Largo arrive unannounced and determined to uncover why the hell Callie gave up her badge, the group is pulled into a mystery they shouldn't have to solve-but no one else seems to care that the Edisto Witch has turned up dead behind the cemetery. In fact, Callie and posse have caught the new chief in a lie about the death. She'll have to decide whether to stay safely retired, save Edisto from an unforeseen criminal element, or take that job offer in her hometown...The dead still speak to Callie Jean Morgan. Whether she's on the job or not.

When a storm blows out power to half the beach, all hell breaks loose. Edisto Beach Police Chief Callie Morgan is called to investigate a break-in at El Marko's, the restaurant owned by the man who's unexpectedly become a real part of her life. Then she sees Mark slide an unspent .41 caliber bullet from the bar into his pocket. A bullet seemingly left as a calling card. A bullet he has no intention of mentioning to her. Before they got involved, Callie knew ex-SLED agent Mark Dupree had a past, one he kept carefully buttoned-up and private around her. She understood, but now that past has come calling and his secrets could get someone killed. Suddenly, the man she thought she knew so well is gone, lost in secrets he won't share. Soon more bullets are left as warnings, all on the doorsteps of people in Mark's life. Adding to the uncertainty and chaos is a new-to-town psychic, warning anyone who will listen that she sees danger around Mark, vowing that within six days someone will die. The hell of it is, Callie isn't certain the psychic is wrong. She's got six days to unearth a past Mark doesn't want her to know and to protect the town she loves from whatever blew in with the storm.

A missing woman. An unidentified body. Summer is just getting started... Police Chief Callie Jean Morgan's hope for a day of nothing but traffic tickets is shattered when one of five women who regularly vacation together on Edisto Island is reported missing. Hours later, a body washes up on the sand-but not the body of the missing young lady. Unable to identify the dead woman, leaving her with a possible murder on her hands, Callie worries the clock might be ticking down to yet another tragedy. She has no choice but to dig into the secrets of the women's group, who now seem unconcerned about their missing member. Tracking down information on the ladies is like chasing air. Even the older residents of Edisto are unwilling to talk about the well-established, yet evasive group known as "The Summer Ladies." Edisto is heating up, and so is Callie Jean Morgan.

What Callie discovers in the middle of a hurricane will put them all at risk. Ordinarily Chief Callie Morgan would have more than a passing interest in the kidnapping of a young girl from the same Charleston college attended by her son. But with a hurricane bearing down on Edisto Island, she has more than enough on her plate getting everyone she can off the beach-including moronic tourists or "tourons" desperate to get themselves killed for the thrill of riding out a hurricane. Amidst gale winds and flooding, she'll be the last off the island. Just like always. Or that's the plan. Except this hurricane isn't playing nice. Her tidy exit strategy doesn't survive first contact with the edge of the storm. Before she can evacuate, a life-threatening injury to a loved one forces her to appeal to three reluctant tourists, ex-Army Rangers, for help getting her people off the island. What Callie discovers in the middle of a hurricane will put them all at risk and maybe save the life of a young girl.

With burglaries at one end of the town and a CBD store on the other, Police Chief Callie Jean Morgan is stretched thin juggling small time crime on Edisto Beach. But someone stops the burglaries ahead of her, someone whose methods remind her of someone all too familiar. Vigilante justice only adds more issues to her plate as lines blur between criminal and hero. The problem is that the vigilante has an attraction for the chief. And she's not too eager to put the cuffs on him.

The Poe family (yes, that Poe) celebrates the matron's eightieth birthday at Edisto Beach. But in a macabre sense of legacy, the members assume a vengeful script of poisonous tricks as they vie for a place in grandmother's Will. When the grandson is poisoned, Edisto Beach Police Chief Callie Morgan arrives to nail the culprit, only for the family to call the act a prank. All possess the culinary skills endowed upon them by the Grand Dame Doris Woolf Poe, author of a renowned cookbook, and the culprit could be any one of them. Callie finds herself in the middle of a passive-aggressive family feud of the highest order while at the same time juggling her own family feud as her mother tries to suck Callie's son into a political role he has no desire to pursue. Then when Callie learns her son knows the Poes, her professional and personal lives cross into territory that leads her into very uncomfortable territory.