Torrey Tunet Mysteries Series

Meet Torrey Tunet. Great career. Big dreams. One terrible mistake. Accept an invitation from a stranger who spills soup on her at a restaurant to stay at his Irish castle? What is pretty translator Torrey Tunet thinking? That's easy. She's thinking that luxurious rooms and gourmet meals beat the seedy Dublin hotel her agency booked for her. Fluent in numerous languages, Torrey intends to say non, nicht, nyet, and no way to any passes her host makes. But even Torrey is left speechless by what he actually suggests...and by stumbling upon a murdered man near a forest cottage. And when a priceless heirloom disappears and an old secret from her past surfaces, all fingers point to Torrey. Now she faces ruin-and gaol (jail)-unless she uncovers a truth darker than Irish nights about twisted minds, sinister passions and red-hot revenge...

Ever seeking peace and quiet for her writing, Torrey Tunet believes she has found it in the quaint village of Ballynagh, nestled in the hills of rural Ireland. But something-she can't quite put her finger on it-is awry. With every change in the wind comes some strange news. First, her closest friend, Rowena Keegan, tries to run over the esteemed Dr. Ashenden, her own grandfather and master of the biggest manor in town. Why, Torrey wonders, would anyone want to kill him, least of all his favorite granddaughter? Torrey wants to believe that Rowena's attack on the doctor was a simple fluke, but when the old man later turns up dead in the forest, and Rowena confides a pressing secret to her, Torrrey can no longer stay intentionally ignorant. An outsider, Torrey looks on in bewilderment as mysteries crop up one after another in her beloved Ashenden family, which has taken her under its wing. And when the grandfather's will is read and a gypsy, shrouded in purple, arrives on the scene, family secrets fifty years old reveal themselves just as new ones begin to arise, capturing the attention of young and old townspeople alike. Ballynagh might never be the same.

It is mid-October and unexpectedly cold in Ballynagh, the small Irish village that Torrey Tunet, the young American translator and sometime amateur sleuth, calls home. She has just built a fire of peat and coal to warm her cottage when a window frame collapses, letting in drafts of icy air. Asking around for the services of a carpenter, she hires local teenager Dakin Cameron to do a few repairs. Dakin is an unusually helpful and likable young man with something on his mind. When he receives a threatening phone call at the cottage, Torrey resolves to try to help him. It seems that Dakin is the son of Natalie Sylvester Cameron, a beautiful heiress whose husband died tragically two years before. Dakin is distressed because someone is trying to blackmail Natalie-and even more distressed when the blackmail attempts lead to a case of murder. At times like these, Torrey gets what her friend Winifred calls a "dragon-slaying look" in her eyes. Determined to uncover the truth no matter what the cost-including the ongoing enmity of the local police inspector--Torrey Tunet must call upon all of her wits and courage to solve the latest Ballynagh mystery.

When American translator and sometime sleuth Torrey Tunet returns home to the Irish village of Ballynagh, she wants nothing more than to relax in front of a peat fire in her cottage. But when she finds an eight-year-old girl at the bus stop, waiting forlornly in the gathering darkness, Torrey reluctantly takes charge of delivering the child to the country house where her usually dependable aunt serves as housekeeper. What they find at Gwathney Hall, however, is not a warmly welcoming Auntie Megan: it's cold-blooded murder. Historian John Gwathney has been brutally shot in his own house, and the immediate suspect is none other than his housekeeper-the girl's aunt-Megan O'Faolain. Certain that her friend Megan is not a killer-and unable to resist a good mystery-Torrey vows to track down the murderer herself. As she digs deeper and deeper into Gwathney's research, looking for clues, she gets caught up in a whirlwind of theft, intrigue, and scandal. Is the guilty party Megan's not-so-secret lover, jealous of the romance Megan and Gwathney had shared? Was it Gwathney's assistant, who stood to gain a great deal upon his mentor's death? Was it Owen Thorpe, whose castle Gwathney visited for mysterious purposes shortly before he was killed? And how does the famous historian's final project-an unprecedented piece of scholarly detective work into the Sack of Baltimore by Algerian pirates-fit into the mysterious puzzle of his murder? As Torrey struggles to clear her friend's name and uncover the real killer, she must employ all her skills to find the key to this shocking crime-and prove that even in a small town such as Ballynagh, people can keep the most dangerous of secrets...