Charlotte Diamond Msyteries Series

Book one in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series. When FBI Investigator, Charlotte Diamond, retired to Diamond Cottage near Maryland’s eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, she thought she had left her life of crime — solving it, that is — behind her, and is struggling to find a new purpose in life. But the small waterfront community of Hopewell on the Choptank, with its wealthy artistically inclined inhabitants, is hiding old crimes and dark secrets, including an almost forgotten murder, beneath its outward quiet and affluence. A surprising number of people from the community have intersecting pasts and dark secrets that Charlotte is unaware of and that become downright murderous, coming to a head when blockbuster movie actress, Brenda Brandon, arrives in the village in full retreat from a recent tragedy in her life. Brenda also brings unexpected romance into Charlotte’s previously straight life. And Sam, the neglected husky who has attached himself to Charlotte, knows more about what is going on than he can tell her, even with his howling.

In the second book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series, intrepid FBI senior investigator Charlotte has settled into retirement on Maryland’s eastern shore of the Chesapeake bay only to find high-level international intrigue has sought her out when the abandoned sailboat of spy master Win Engleton washes up against her dock. When blood is found in the boat the question is - was it suicide or murder? Charlotte struggles with having to choose between focusing on her new-found significant other, former movie star Brenda Boynton, or a complex espionage mystery of who did what to who and why that reopens ever deeper mysteries again and again like a Matryoshka Russian nesting doll.

Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond is cajoled into taking a Christmas market Rhine river cruise with her partner, glamorous retired queen of the movie screen Brenda Brandon/Boynton. When Brenda invites Charlotte’s doctor brother, Chance Diamond, and his minister wife, Marilyn, to join in the trip, Charlotte knows this will be no restful vacation. The “curse of Chance,” the travels of whom have always been accompanied by a death or three, does indeed embroil Charlotte and her three travel companions in a complex mix of “inconvenient” robberies and suspicious deaths against a backdrop of quaint German towns, Christmas markets, and Rhine castles. The misadventure of the Rhine river cruise involves an international crime money-laundering Swiss banker and his Italian TV star wife; a “Jack Sprat” pair of elderly spinsters; a doll-fetish Japanese couple; a diamond-dripping, once-kidnapped heiress; a gay novelist and boyfriend; a catatonic mustard dynasty heiress; and assorted other unsavory characters. As the Rhine Maiden scenically chugs north from Nürnberg to Amsterdam over Christmas week, Charlotte and Brenda track their bet on whether the “curse of Chance” will meet its quota of mayhem, while Charlotte sinks deeper and deeper into what becomes a working vacation. The fourth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series.

The sixth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds the retired FBI agent and her significant other, movie star Brenda Brandon, on the edge of the Florida Everglades to film a movie within a movie about an old movie. Brenda has taken a cameo role in the reprise of her first film experience, a Vietnam air war film of forty years earlier that was closed down by a brush with espionage, a murder, and the disappearance of the movie’s star, White Orchid, factors that combined to pique the interest of the FBI. Charlotte has been hired as a technical consultant to help weave a blockbuster movie script out of the earlier, failed filming. When the mysteries of the earlier film come back to haunt the new film crew and cast after the crash of a company plane in the Everglades, Charlotte finds herself deputized by the FBI to figure out not only what happened then, but what is happening now—and why. In this, she receives the help of another technical expert on the film, Ed Winslow, who always seems to know more than he is revealing and who takes an interest in Charlotte that equals that of Charlotte’s former lover and FBI contact, Evan Worthington, who wants Charlotte back in his life. As badly as Charlotte wants to unravel the mysteries of the lost White Orchid, an unknown someone seems even more determined to keep the past buried—even if it means that Charlotte needs to be buried as well.

The third Charlotte Diamond mystery. Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond finds herself jetting from murder on one coast of the United States to kidnapping on another in attempts to save both her lover and her former husband. Charlotte follows her new-found companion, the leading movie actress, Brenda Brandon, to Hollywood. Brenda had abruptly abandoned Hollywood and the movies and returned to her hometown of Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. But a cameo movie role she cannot turn down returns her to the scene of an old murder, for which she now is the leading suspect. Barely having dealt with that mystery on the West Coast, Charlotte is called back to Ocean City, Maryland, where her former husband and his new gambling casino have been targeted by the mob, and his new wife kidnapped. Torn from West Coast to East Coast and thrown into the sphere of an even older and brighter flame than her former husband just when she had thought that her life was settling down, Charlotte is finding out that retirement looks a whole lot similar to when she was working on all cylinders at the FBI.

As the eighth book in the Charlotte Diamond Mystery series opens, former FBI senior agent Charlotte and her movie star significant other, Brenda Boynton/Brandon, are taking quick advantage of a recent change in Maryland’s same-sex marriage laws to tie the knot. Unfortunately, from the very beginning of the ceremony, the naturally tumultuous life of the two becomes overshadowed by a wedding full of disasters in the form of a freak March snowstorm, the theft of the wedding limousine, and a murder and moves on to the honeymoon from hell. The honeymoon continues to unravel as the two, accompanied by their wedding party of Charlotte’s doctor brother, Chance, and his minister wife, Marilyn, and Brenda’s movie star son, Tony, and his professional tennis star girlfriend, Michelle, plow through the snow to make their Bahamas honeymoon cruise connection in Baltimore harbor. Once on board, Charlotte becomes steeped in more of the mysteries that seem to attach to her like magnets and Brenda again is wooed back into her movie star mode. As the shipboard disasters and dramas escalate around them Charlotte and Brenda must fight to preserve the true meaning of their brave decision to marry.

In the fifth Charlotte Diamond mystery, the retired FBI investigator and her significant other, glamorous senior movie star Brenda Brandon (aka Boynton), return from a murder- and gem-theft-punctuated Christmas cruise down the Rhine River to confusion and catastrophe in their usually quiet retirement village of Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland. The wooded lot next door to Brenda’s historical mansion, a lot that Brenda thought she owned, is being bulldozed by a New York construction firm for a mystery development. All of the homes and land from Charlotte’s own riverside cottage to the end of their road are being leveled as well, including Charlotte’s neighbors’ house, and she has no idea where their dog sitter may have gone with their beloved dogs, Rocket and Sam. The two women and their previously sleepy riverside village are propelled into a hotbed of confusion, with disappearances and murder aplenty. Only Charlotte’s experience and skills from her previous life in the FBI and the appearance of an old flame Charlotte has been trying to avoid because of mixed feelings enable them to start unraveling the mystery of what is happening with spymaster Win Engleton’s property.

In the seventh of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte and her significant other, box office senior movie star Brenda Boynton, return from a Florida Everglades movie shoot to an economically distressed village, Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay shore. A scheme by New Jersey mobsters to build an illegal casino resort has collapsed but not before half the village has been leveled and the local business owners have committed to overexpansion. Brenda comes with a saving plan to use lottery winnings to establish a retirement community for destitute movie industry retirees in the village. While both Brenda and Charlotte bring this plan to fruition, Charlotte contends with a flurry of auto thefts, a murderess on the loose, a sixty-year old bank heist buried treasure, the return of her former husband and his acidic mother, and a group of old movie folks so ungrateful and motivated by revenge that soon someone swings from a chandelier, threatening to return the village to chaos and Brenda and Charlotte’s dreams to dust.

The ninth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond contemplating too many coincidences in what should be two separate mysteries. The mysteries start with two murders and the uncovering of a illegal drug distribution ring in what should be a bucolic, out-of-the-way place, the Curtain Call movie folks retirement community in Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland that Charlotte owns and operates with her spouse, movie top box-office star, Brenda Brandon. The drugs are distributed in plastic packets with a green palm tree embossed on them. When the two head south for Brenda’s singing appearance at the annual Spoleto arts festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the same packets turn up there. The “too many coincidences” continue as the two women find themselves landing in danger by agreeing to stay during Brenda’s Spoleto gig at a coastal tea plantation owned by an actress with whom Brenda had appeared in Hollywood movies.

The tenth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series takes retired FBI agent Charlotte Diamond, and her spouse, movie star Brenda Brandon/Boynton, to an aging mountaintop palace in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their late summer foursome vacation plans to bask on Hilton Head Island with Charlotte’s brother, Williamsburg physician Chance Diamond, and his Methodist minister wife, Marilyn, are scotched by an approaching hurricane. And Charlotte becomes embroiled in the reopening of the drug distribution operation she encountered in the last book in the series, "Follow the Palm". Before plans can be made on a substitute vacation, an unwelcome college mate of Charlotte and Marilyn’s, Regina Fowler, stumbles in to beg Charlotte to come up to the ancestral home, Fowler’s Folly, she owns with two cousins, to stop a drug operation, dramatically dropping a cocaine packet with the same logo on it as in the case Charlotte thought had just been solved. Once arriving at Fowler’s Folly and stuck there because the hurricane they were avoiding in Hilton Head veered to the Blue Ridge Mountains instead, Charlotte and family are guided by a clairvoyant into uncovering multiple mysteries.

The eleventh Charlotte Diamond mystery is one of pulling up the past to clutch at those in the present. The book finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond and her spouse, senior movie star Brenda Boynton/Brandon, taking a long-delayed vacation on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina with Charlotte’s brother, Chance Diamond, and his wife, Marilyn. Brenda is there to participate in a celebrity golf tournament and attend two film nights in nearby Charleston and Savannah. The real purpose of the “vacation,” however, is that Charlotte is helping old friend and beau, Evan Worthington, track down a sex slave operation possibly using the nearby Daufuskie Island. Connections with the past abound in the book—Charlotte and Brenda with former men friends; Marilyn Diamond, in medical distress, with her own historical past; Brenda’s son, the actor Tony Trice, with a former lover in the midst of current marital difficulties; and other, local characters with connections to slavery and each other going back to late eighteenth-century South Carolina low country history. As each character struggles with the enslavement of her or his own past, their histories become crossed and the mystery of the sex slave trade in the low country deepens around them and threatens their mere existence.