BooksChatter: ☀☄ The Devil's Hook: Emory Crawford Mysteries [2]- Pearl R. Meaker

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for The Devil's Hook, a Cozy Mystery by Pearl R. Meaker (15 September 2015, Promontory Press, 170 pages).

This is the second book in the Emory Crawford Mysteries series.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below, as well as our Q&A with author Pearl R. Meaker. Read the first three chapters with Amazon Look Inside. The Devil's Hook is FREE on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.

Author The Devil's Hook will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Trailer | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

Jairus Twombly's familial intuition is faltering and his new personal assistant seems to be trying to replace his wife, Amy.

On the Twombly College campus, someone is breaking into the dorm rooms of female students leaving things instead of taking things: red colored objects including a red golf ball, a red ribbon and a tiny red stuffed dog.

When a recipient of some of the red objects goes missing and is returned after being told, "You're not her", and the personal assistant turns up dead with Amy Twombly's elegant Bloodwood crochet hook in her eye, things heat up for Emory Crawford and her chemist and forensic scientist husband, Dr. Jebbin Crawford.

Emory, along with the Twombly's Nancy Drew-like daughter, Madison, once more turns to her amateur detective skills and intuition to solve the mysteries.

Teaser: Excerpt

     “Yeah. Well.” Captain Henry looked into the box. “Weird things. An un-inflated red balloon. Round shaped, not like a condom or something like that. A red golf ball. I mean, where on earth do you get red golf balls? And six more things. The roommate said she’d gotten more of this junk than anyone else, so far. Here.” He plopped the box on Jebbin’s desk with a thud and stuck a clipboard in front of his face. “It’s all yours as soon as you sign for it. Items are all listed on the form. We didn’t do a bunch of separate sheets, but they’re all bagged and numbered individually.”
     Jebbin signed the sheet and handed back the clipboard.
     “I ‘suppose you’re gonna let her look through it all?” Henry said, looking at me. He held his right hand up like a cop directing traffic to stop. “No. Nope. Don’t tell me. I really don’t want to know. Like you said. Your office. Your little scientific, antiseptic, sterile world where, yep, they’re all your decisions.”
     He walked out, though I caught his mutter: “Whole crime fighting world is goin’ to hell in a handcart.” He gave me one last look before he closed the door.
     “Can I see?” I sounded as much like an eager kindergartener as I could.
     “Yes, little Emory. You can look if you’re a good girl and don’t open any of the baggies yourself and don’t touch the things inside them.”
     “Yipee!”
     We both got up, Sophie too, to take the box to the lab.
     Jebbin paused to look around, as though he was forgetting something.
     “What?” I asked.
     “Where’s the handcart that you’re taking the whole of investigative procedure to hell in?”
     I linked my arm through his. “I left it at home.”

The Devil's Hook - available NOW!

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The Series: Emory Crawford Mysteries

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

The Devil's Music [1]

When an acclaimed scholar and musician is found murdered on the Twombly College campus where her husband teaches chemistry and is a forensic scientist, Emory Crawford decides she can help. She's a professor's wife, not an official. People will talk to her. So she heads out with her knitting tote and emerges as the most inquisitive, persistent and clever amateur detective since Miss Marple.

[Published 30 April 2015, 218 pages]

About the Author

Pearl R. Meaker is an upper-middle-aged, short, pudgy homemaker, mother, and grandmother who in 2002 became a writer. Initially writing fanfiction she soon tried original fiction at the encouragement of her regular readers. She has been a life-long lover of mystery stories and automatically went to that genre for her first book, The Devil’s Music.

She and her husband of nearly 40 years live in central Illinois. They both love bluegrass music, playing fiddle and banjo and singing. Pearl also does many crafts – when she’s not reading or writing - knitting, crochet, origami, needlepoint, and cross-stitch among them. She also enjoys birding and photography and is a former fencer.

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