Murder Under Her Skin

New York, 1946: The last time Will Parker let a case get personal, she walked away with a broken face, a bruised ego, and the solemn promise never again to let her heart get in the way of her job. But she called Hart and Halloway's Travelling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus's tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go.

To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren't playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.

Dodging fistfights, firebombs, and flying lead, Will puts a lot more than her heart on the line in the search of the truth. Can she find it before someone stops her ticker for good?

Fortune Favours The Dead

New York City, 1945 - Willowjean “Will” Parker has been the assistant to famed detective Lillian Pentecost for three years. A teenage runaway who spent her adolescence working for a traveling circus, Will now uses her unique set of skills to track down leads, corner criminals, and act as the right-hand woman to Ms. Pentecost, who is battling multiple sclerosis.

Knowing she may become lead detective sooner rather than later because of Ms. Pentecost’s illness, and unsure she has what it takes, Will does her best to cover up her doubts with a hardboiled bravado she’s picked up from dime-store detective novels.

On the surface, the Collins case looks like any other high-society murder. Ms. Pentecost has cracked dozens of them. But those previous cases didn’t include messages from the dead, a blackmailing spiritualist, or Becca Collins - the beautiful daughter of the deceased, whom Will quickly starts falling for.

When the spiritualist turns up murdered the day after “channelling” Will’s dead mother, Will becomes the prime suspect. To make matters worse, her relationship with Becca may have made her the killer’s next target. Will is second-guessing her every move, scared she doesn’t have what it takes to be a real detective and that she’s nothing more than a runaway circus girl playing a part.