Full of danger, breathless action and intrigue, Author Michaela Thompson’s mysteries are skillfully plotted with well-laid clues to reward the reader. A cornerstone of Michaela’s writing is her carefully researched and vividly drawn settings. Enjoy!
Venetian Mask: A Michaela Thompson International Thriller
Michaela Thompson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
MURDER AT CARNIVAL IN THE FLOATING CITY
The surreal splendor of Venice glitters and mesmerizes as six so-called friends who, it turns out, barely know each other meet at Carnival to play a malignant game that quickly turns murderous. Sally, the “Tallahassee lassie” spurned by the rest as a virtual hayseed, is swept up by a mysterious count, attending masked balls, operas, and Carnival revels even as she mourns her marriage and dodges a deadly pursuer. “Things should happen at Carnival,” says her unlikely protector, who resembles Harlequin in more than his costume. “If they go on just the same, there’s no reason for Carnival at all.” There’s absolutely no chance of that in this psychological tour de force of surging identities wrestling to emerge in people forced by violence to confront their inner Harlequins and Medusas.
The characters change costumes, alter egos, sex partners (and preferences), and most of all, their stories while Carnival swirls around them, each more desperate by the hour to solve the murder, commit another, save a career, escape a past…whatever it is that Carnival, as much a character as the humans, seems to command them to do. The guignol grows ever grander, the danger more heightened as the clock ticks toward midnight on Fat Tuesday and Sally finds she has more enemies than she thought.
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Hurricane Season: Florida Panhandle Mystery # 1
Michaela Thompson
Genre: Historical Fiction | Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
A STORM, AN ILLICIT LOVE AFFAIR, AND MOONSHINE… (actually, two illicit love affairs)
The 1950s fairly leap off the page in this classic cozy mystery set in northern Florida in the Eisenhower era, complete with Johnny Ray on the jukebox and a Womanless Wedding–this one interrupted by an explosion at a moonshine still. Lily Trulock, owner of Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply, leads a pretty quiet life until a stranger comes to town. The new guy’s not what he appears, but then, some of St. Elmo’s residents aren’t either.
Before she can say, “down the hatch,” Lily’s at the center of a vicious murder and a no-holds-barred bootlegging war–and a nasty storm’s on the way. This is a vibrant, atmospheric, powerful novel–as filled with energy, mystery, and motion as a hurricane.
Hurricane Season is as much a richly-detailed, spot-on historical as a mystery, widely praised by masters of the genre and reviewers alike for its pitch-perfect period feel and fine, spare writing.
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Riptide: A Florida Panhandle Mystery(#2)
Michaela Thompson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
A RIP-ROARING, PULSE-POUNDING FLORIDA PUZZLER…
As intricate as a fisherman’s net, Riptide fairly writhes with sinister delights–family secrets, family feuds, lost family fortunes, betrayals, puzzles, sunken treasure… and murder, of course. With a bit of illicit romance and treachery thrown in for seasoning. This rife atmosphere swirls around New york artist Isabel Anders, who’s summoned home to tiny St. Elmo, Florida to deal with an emergency: the aunt who raised her has been brutally–and mysteriously–injured.
Isabel arrives to find the family mansion in ruins, her aunt living in a trailer, and, dangerous as a cottonmouth, the lover she left at sixteen just where he used to be. Waiting for her. Except now he’s got a grudge against her, a secret of his own, and some unsavory companions. Just when Isabel’s aunt seems to be getting better (but before she’s able to talk again) she dies just as mysteriously as she was injured. Suspecting murder, Isabel quickly ties her aunt’s death to another.
But to find the killer, she has to hack her way through a small-town jungle of intrigue and several generations of interrelated secrets, producing hours of pulse-pounding delight for the confirmed puzzle fan.
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Magic Mirror (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Book 1)
Michaela Thompson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
SACRE BLEU! THEY KILLED A MAN FOR A MIRROR!
Florida transplant Georgia Lee Maxwell doesn’t take to Paris at first, despite the fact that she’s at least leaving a no-good man and a hated job as a society editor. Now she’s a Paris correspondent, thank you very much–a dream come true for any journalist.
There’s just a slight down side–she arrives in freezing rain, gets caught in a traffic jam caused by a bomb scare, and hates her apartment; but the real Bonjour is finding herself face down on a museum floor during a robbery. “Killed for a boring story!” she thinks. But as it happens, she isn’t the one who dies. Three terrifying masked gunmen shoot the unfortunate security guard.
They could have stolen all the treasures of Monte Cristo’s cave, so to speak, but it turns out they’ve made off with only a mirror. True, it once belonged to the French seer Nostradamus, but it may be the museum’s least valuable item.
Does it have some prophetic ability? Does someone know something the gendarmes don’t? Here’s what Georgia Lee knows: If she finds out first, she’s a journalistic hero. If she doesn’t, she’s dead.
Excerpt:
The first hint of anything extraordinary was a loud clattering on the staircase we had just descended. A moment later, three people burst violently into the room.
One of them, stumbling as if he’d been pushed, was the blue-uniformed guard I’d seen upstairs. The other two wore jeans, burgundy-colored ski masks, brown leather bomber jackets, and gloves. Both of them held stubby black guns. They looked around at us. One of them spat out some sort of order in French.
It was the most ungodly nightmare. Here were these killers, or terrorists, or who knew what, telling us to do something, and they were telling us in French. At that moment, I couldn’t have understood Bonjour. But the others– the guard, Mallet, Overton– were getting on the floor and lying face down, so I did the same. In a second, one of the intruders grabbed my wrists and taped them together, tight. I heard them shuffling around taping the others.
I lay with my nose pressed against the cold linoleum, wishing to God I’d never left Florida. Any indignity I’d had to put up with at the Sun was nothing compared to this. I was going to be killed, and all because of a story about art conservation that probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. I thought about Mama and Daddy, and about Twinkie, who was just getting adjusted to Paris. I’m happy to say I didn’t give more than a passing thought to Ray Brown, the man I’d left in Bay City who wasn’t worth a damn.
All of this took just seconds. I heard a drawer opening and closing. The back of my head prickled. In everything I’d read about these situations, people got shot in the back of the head. The prickling became a numbness that crawled down my neck and along my spine.
Only a moment later, the shot came.
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A Temporary Ghost (The Georgia Lee Maxwell Series, Series 2)
Michaela Thompson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
The SECOND novel in the Georgia Lee Maxwell series.
A GHOST-WRITING GIG IN PROVENCE–SHE’S LIVING THE DREAM! UNTIL THE KILLING STARTS…
In journalist Georgia Lee Maxwell’s second adventure, she leaves her new home in Paris for Provence, where she’s been offered a lucrative ghost-writing job. But her co-author, suspected murderess Vivien Howard, the widow of a wealthy New York financier, seems strangely uninterested in writing her memoirVivian was widely believed to have murdered her husband but was never charged with the crime, and now she promises to tell all.
Amid the beauties of Provence, settled in, a charming renovated farmhouse, Georgia Lee finds a household full of ill-feeling, not to mention suspicious characters — Vivien’s handsome artist lover, Ross; her neurotic daughter, Blanche; and Pedro Ruiz, a mysterious housekeeper who has accompanied them from New York.
Frustrated by Vivien’s lack of cooperation and unnerved by threatening letters, Georgia Lee soon realizes that she has become a player in a more dangerous game than she could have imagined. And then there’s another murder.
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