The American girl

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Martha Grimes

Inspector Richard Jury mysteries #1 The quaint, many-hued cottages lining Long Piddleton's High Street were capped with new snow and glittering in the morning sunshine. Pretty enough to be a Christmas card, the hamlet was, instead, the scene of two singularly gruesome murders. Martha Grimes's delightfully British novel of detection introduces Inspector Richard Jury, an affable, pragmatic investigator who has a winning way of ignoring protocol and playing his own canny game. Jury is dispatched to the quiet Northants village of Long Piddleton at Christmastime to help solve a spate of murders that have confounded the local constabulary. [From inside front cover.]

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Patricia Sprinkle

Georgia magistrate MacLaren Yarbrough is back in a brand-new Thoroughly Southern Mystery... A black cloud covers the town of Hopemore, Georgia, when a favorite high school chemistry teacher is found dead. But if this is murder, darkness may be lurking in places where even sharp-eyed MacLaren would never think to look...

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Kate Charles

Everyone agrees that Bob Dexter, the prominent Evangelical clergyman, has a great deal of personal charisma. Those who know him realise that he also has an unshakable faith in his own righteousness, and a real talent for rubbing people up the wrong way. It is no surprise, therefore, that someone should want to kill him. In fact, when the Reverend Dexter moves to a small Norfolk parish, traditionally Anglo-Catholic, and begins remoulding it in his own image, his distraught parishioners are not the only ones with good reason to want to remove him. And there are secrets in his seemingly tranquil family life that Dexter does not even begin to suspect - until the fateful and eventful day of his death. Solicitor David Middleton-Brown and his artist-friend Lucy Kingsley step in to investigate. Their search for the truth culminates at the annual National Pilgrimage to Walsingham, where Anglo-Catholic pomp clashes with heated Evangelical protest, and feelings run perilously high. Too late, perhaps, David realises the danger: will he be in time to prevent a second murder?

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James Thompson

Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the bleakest time of the year in Lapland. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold above the Arctic Circle drive everyone just a little insane ... perhaps enough to kill.