Dinah Pelerin Mysteries Series

  The Top End of Australia is a land teeming with crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and curious Aboriginal myths.  It's a strange place to choose to end one's life, but that is what Dinah Pelerin's wealthy American uncle has done.  Dying of cancer, he has summoned his entire family – current wife, ex-wife, assorted children and niece – to a remote, comfortless lodge where he intends to rewrite his will and commit suicide with the aid of a rogue Australian physician with whom he shares a mysterious history. Dinah sees this time with her uncle as a last chance to learn the truth about her father, who died during the commission of a felony when she was a child.  But when she arrives, she discovers that the truth has more and darker ramifications than she'd bargained on.  Her artist brother thinks he's possessed by the spirit of snake god who is moving his hand metaphysically across the canvas; her uncle, who isn't really her uncle, is obsessed by a woman he married but could never possess; the rest of the family is seething with resentments; and a man none of them claims to know is murdered on a nearby island, impaled on the back of a sea turtle.  A wannabe anthropologist with a passion for mythology, Dinah tries to sort out the complicated song lines of her own ancestors while struggling to understand Dreamtime and solve not one, but two bizarre murders.  The Aboriginal concept of payback law takes on a terrible new meaning.  

Anthropologist Dinah Pelerin had no idea when she left sunny Hawaii for Norway that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering and the Doomsday Seed Vault. Nor did she expect that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife...or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms. In late December, Polar Night wraps the little town of Longyearbyen like a lead blanket, impenetrable and endless. The temperature rarely climbs above zero and bodies don't decompose in the permafrost. The dead have to be shipped south for burial and soon there are two murder victims headed south. Who has killed them and why? With three U.S. senators, a powerful corporate CEO, and a Norwegian government minister as her fellow suspects, Dinah is under no illusions about taking the fall. She had better untangle the knot of motives and pretenses fast or suspicion will come crashing downhill like an avalanche and bury her so deep she'll never see daylight again.

In 1973, on a remote beach on the Greek island of Samos, a movie star named Marilita Stephan murdered her boyfriend, his mother,and a powerful colonel in the military junta, a crime for which she was executed. Forty years later, Dinah Pelerinarrives on Samos to spend the summer with her Norwegian boyfriend Thor before she joins an archaeological dig nearby. A policeman on sabbatical, Thor seems unduly fascinated by the murders and Dinah soon discovers that the had more than romance in mind when he chose their holiday destination. Guns supplied to the former junta by the American CIA have turned up in Norway in the hands of terrorists and Norwegian intelligence has traced the source of the weapons to Samos. The island has become a transit point for refugees fleeing the Middle East. When an Iraqi immigrantwith a fake ID is killed, Thor suspects a link to the arms traffickers. But before he can investigate, his car plunges off a cliff and he disappears.Greece's economic woes have bred corruption and Dinah fears that he was betrayed by local police and either kidnapped or murdered. Unable to trust anyone, she sets out to find him. The deeper she digs, the more connections she sees between the present crime wave and what happened in 1973. Marilitamay have been innocent and the fate of her boyfriend holds eerie parallels to Thor's disappearance. Dinah must be smarter and braver than she's ever been to prevent another Greek tragedy.

Dinah Pelerin has finally put her life in order. Living in Berlin with her boyfriend Thor, she has landed a job teaching Native American cultures at the university. She's never felt happier. And then her Seminole mother Swan shows up with a crazy scheme to blackmail a German tax dodger and dredges up a secret Dinah has kept hidden from the IRS and from straight-arrow Norwegian Thor, a former cop now with hush-hush international duties. Germans harbor a century-long fascination with the American Wild West and American Indians. Some enthusiasts dress up as Indians and adopt Indian names, like Der Indianer Club which has invited Swan to a powwow where she plans to meet her blackmail victim. Dinah tries to head her off, but arrives at the scene too late. A man has been killed and scalped and Swan quickly becomes the prime suspect. Torn between love for her mother and dismay at her incessant lies, Dinah sets out to find the killer - hoping the killer doesn't turn out to share her DNA. But Swan isn't the only liar. Everyone is lying about something. Margaret, Swan's dead ex-husband's former wife, who came to the city with Swan. Dinah's teen-age "ward." Thor. Especially Dinah. Ghosts of Germany's terrible history haunt Berlin while she faces exorcising a hateful ghost of her own.