The Charlotte Anthony Mysteries Box Set. Books 1-4

Book excerpt: The first four Charlotte Anthony Mystery novels in one box set. The Charlotte Anthony novels are traditional, character-driven amateur detective mysteries where the past informs the present, and a small town in the American Midwest is connected to the larger world in often surprising ways. An Uncollected Death introduces Charlotte Anthony, a forty-something divorcée, single mother and magazine editor who suddenly finds herself an empty-nester, unemployed, and on the verge of bankruptcy. She gratefully takes the job of editing the journals of Olivia Bernadin, a long-lost nouveau roman author. Things rapidly deteriorate, however, when she finds Olivia left for dead the first day on the job--and herself a suspect in the crime. In An Unexamined Wife, plans for an idyllic holiday in Aspen are disrupted by the discovery of a dead professor in his lab full of suspicious-looking plants. Once again, Charlotte joins forces with Detective Barnes to solve a murder that is anything but straightforward. Potential motives and suspects are many and the prof's complicated love life only adds to the confusion. An Undisclosed Vocation begins with startling events: An explosion. A death. The destruction of a popular Elm Grove business. Charlotte Anthony, caught up in the ensuing chaos, wonders what the victim meant when he said he knew something "that could get us both killed." In An Uncharted Corpse, the strange appearance of a mummy at a conference sets off a chain of events with repercussions that go far beyond the staid world of academia. A suspicious death, a secret code, and a powerful sect combine to intimately connect the past to the present.