Annette Meyers Mystery Collection

Annette Meyers Books and Novels

Murder Me Now by Annette Meyers

Amazon.com
Olivia Brown (Oliver to her friends)--bohemian poet, advocate of women's rights and free love, and connoisseur of bootleg gin--has the unpleasant habit of stumbling across dead bodies. When she finds Fordy and Kate Vaudes' demure nanny, Adelle, hanging from a tree during a country house weekend, Olivia is sure suicide is the wrong assumption. After all, why would Adelle hang herself with a man's leather belt?
Back in Greenwich Village, Oliver and her housemate, private detective Harry Melville, plunge into an investigation that takes them from Oliver's gently gin- soaked literary world to an array of nefarious dens of iniquity. Adelle, it turns out, was Adeline Zimmerman, former Pinkerton detective; Daisy, one of the guests at that country weekend, was Adeline's sister; and both Zimmerman women were having an affair with Lester Nolan, the corrupt cop ("a wax model of a hero in human clothing") who's doing the commissioner a favor by looking into the murder. What (or whom) was Adeline investigating? What has caused the sudden tension between Fordy and Kate? And who, really, is Celia, the beautiful photographer who drifts in and out of Oliver's life like a bewitching muse?
As Olivia tries to trace a path through Village society (where everyone knows everyone else, and serial alliances and misalliances are so common that "It was like putting a light to a single match in a row of matches and watching one catch fire, then another, and another until the whole parcel was ablaze"), she finds herself rubbing elbows with an assortment of picturesque characters, from mobsters to authors. One of these charming individuals is a deadly threat--but which?
The novel is refreshingly free of glaring anachronisms, and author Annette Meyers has obviously done her research on Village literary life in the '20s. But Meyers is no Fitzgerald, nor even a Michael Cunningham. Though the novel preens itself a trifle ostentatiously on its periodicity, tending toward heavy-handed references to the Great War, it fails to capture the poignantly fragile glamour of the era, with its heady whirlwind of flappers, expatriate authors, and jazz and its haunting legacy of trench warfare, poison gas, and dislocated modernity. As long as it doesn't try too hard, however, the Olivia Brown series is a perfectly pleasant diversion, as amusing as--and less rigorous than--the Charleston.

The Dutchman by Maan Meyers

Pieter Tonneman, the law in the fledgling Dutch settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, must look into the apparent suicide of a local tavern owner and a fire in Jews Alley.

Free Love by Annette Meyers

It's 1920, and excitement fills the winding streets of Greenwich Village, where artists, actors, and writers gather and romance isn't played by any rules. Here, amid the hot jazz and cool gin, a free-spirited young poet named Olivia Brown finds her perfect milieu . . . and deadly danger. When Olivia inherits a brownstone on Bedford Street, she revels in the freedom to do whatever she likes, dress as she pleases, and love where she will . . . until the night she literally trips over a body. Looking at the corpse's face, the dashing beauty gets an even greater shock--it looks just like her! Now terror stalks the budding sleuth. For if she doesn't manage to smoke out the killer, and fast, everyone will be lamenting the fate of the poet Olivia Brown--the one with so much promise, the one who died so young. . . .

Murder : The Musical by Annette Meyers

Amateur detectives Xenia Smith and Leslie Wetzon get their big break on Broadway, when the stage manager of an up-and-coming production is found dead in the balcony and a full cast of potential killers is in the spotlight.

These Bones Were Made for Dancin' : A Smith and Wetzon Mystery by Annette Meyers

Author Annette Meyers once again brings her first-hand Broadway experience to bear in this sizzling new Smith and Wetzon mystery. Leslie Wetzon is dusting off her tap shoes for a good cause: a benefit revival of the hit Broadway musical "Combinations," complete with as many of the original cast stars as Wetzon's headhunting talents can unearth. But when she digs up not the missing leading lady but a trunk full of bones, it seems someone may be targeting Wetzon for a featured role not in a musical comedy, but in a very deadly murder plot, indeed.

Tender Death by Annette Meyers

The Groaning Board: A Smith & Wetzon Mystery by Annette Meyers

Amazon.com
Beneath the cutesy tagline "A Smith and Wetzon Mystery" lies a shrewd and funny series about two female Wall Street headhunters whose combined strengths and quirks make a formidable, fascinating unit. This seventh outing keeps the tall, elegant, coolly autocratic Xenia Smith in the background while petite Leslie Wetzson--an ex-Broadway dancer who too often lets her heart get her into trouble--trades one controlling lover for another as she explores the connections between a couple of poisonings and an upscale catering company. Annette Meyers writes a series of excellent historical mysteries (under the pseudonym Maan Meyers) with her husband Martin, set in Dutch New Amsterdam before it became New York (The Dutchman's Dilemma, The House on Mulberry Street). Here she creates a perfect tone--part bitchy, part lyrical--for her tales of more recent Manhattanites.

The Deadliest Option by Annette Meyers

When Goldie Barnes, the Golden Lion of Wall Street, drops dead at his retirement dinner, Barnes's firm hires boardroom detectives Xenia Smith and Leslie Wetzon to solve the mystery surrounding his death.

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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