Oliver Swithin Mysteries

""Academia (n.): a profession filled with bad food, knee-jerk liberalism, and murder... Being a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Marthas College in Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone busy, but Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination of weddings, work, and spookery deprives her of five of her closest allies, she leaps at an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor on an American campus. With her head full of romantic fantasies inspired by 1950s Hollywood, and accompanied by Horace, her loquacious and disconcerting parrot, this intellectually-rigorous right-winger sets off from England blissfully unaware that academia in the United States is dominated by knee-jerk liberalism, contempt for Western civilization, and the institutionalisation of a form of insane political-correctness. Will the bonne viveuse Baroness Troutbeck be able to cope with the culinary and vinous desert that is New Paddington, Indiana? Can this insensitive and tactless human battering-ram defeat the thought-police who run Freeman State University like a gulag? Does she believe the late Provost was murdered? If so, what should she do about it? And will she manage to persuade Robert Amisswho describes himself bitterly as Watson to her Holmes and Goodwin to her Nero Wolfeto abandon his honeymoon and fly to her side?

A smart debut sends Jackson Oliver, head of online gambling casino VegasVegas, headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica, to a New England village where he suspects someone has gotten away with murder-and used VegasVegas as part of the clever con. Jackson not only feels like a chump for accepting a bet that will cost VegasVegas a hundred grand, he's exposed the casino to blacklisting by the Offshore Gaming Association, which could ruin it. How did this happen? It's a celebrity-obsessed age. VegasVegas posts novelty propositions so its customers can bet on the outcome of TV shows like The Voice and The Bachelorette, and on political elections and celebrity murder trials. VegasVegas customers don't want to bet on speeding tickets or misdemeanor theft. They're star-obsessed. Athlete, musician, actor, socialite-the more the victim or alleged perpetrator shows up on TMZ, the more money bettors fork out. So VegasVegas offered odds on various outcomes in the trial of a movie director accused of murdering his wife. The trial comes fourteen months after Andrew Marvel's arrest, and conviction seems certain. When a customer bets $1,000 that all charges will be dropped-an outcome so unlikely that the odds are 100 to 1-Jackson takes the bet. Audrey Marvel was killed in the couple's lakeside summer home in Greensboro, Vermont. Audrey's blood was all over Andrew's clothes, which the police found at the bottom of the lake. Andrew's wild account that he'd been drugged with Doxepin and hijacked sounds like it was ghostwritten by the prosecutor. Yet two days after the bet made at VegasVegas, an unshakable video alibi for Andrew surfaces, proving the director was three hours away at the time of Audrey's murder. And all charges are dropped. Jackson suspects the bettor, a Greensboro resident, had inside information-or worse-making the bet fraudulent and letting VegasVegas off the hook. With no time to lose proving his theory, Jackson hops a plane to Vermont. There, working undercover, he begins to investigate the Marvel murder. A ring of antique weathervane thieves and an attractive crime blogger with movie scripts in her past figure in. This Isn't a Game starts a series where Jackson will explore both crimes and new career trajectories.

Scotland Yard is hunting the worst kind of serial killer—one with a sense of humor. When children's book author Oliver Swithin, reluctant creator of the notorious "Finsbury the Ferret," finds an old friend's body floating in a Trafalgar Square fountain, he can't convince the police to treat the death as a murder. But then more corpses turn up daily—on a tube station platform, in a botanical gardens hothouse, even in the middle of Piccadilly Circus—each murdered in an increasingly bizarre manner. It seems that a serial killer is at play, using London's landscape as his game board. Oliver joins his uncle, Detective Superintendent Tim Mallard, in a race to uncover the pattern behind the growing number of deaths. But even if they solve the murderer's puzzle, will it help them identify the next victim before the killer strikes again? And will Oliver ever reveal his secret passion for Mallard's assistant, the forbidding Detective Sergeant Effie Strongitharm? And what does any of this have to do with a battery-operated ferret, the works of Lewis Carroll, the great London Scorpion Scare, the episode of the nude Macbeth, and Underwood Tooth, the world's leading expert on being ignored?