Dude on Arrival • The Bridled Groom

Book excerpt: Sarah Deane has her traveling shoes on again and we all know a sleuth never gets a peaceful vacation. It’s holidays at a swanky Arizona resort for English professor Sarah Deane, her fiance, and her feisty Aunt Julia, but somebody’s notion of Yuletide appears to include increasingly unpleasant pranks...which turn from nasty to deadly on Christmas morning. In a tip of the hat to Golden Age mysteries, the police are clueless, but Sarah is unhappily certain the killer—the Dude?—is one of the hotel’s guests, someone with whom she’d been singing carols only hours earlier. In The Bridled Groom, Sarah and Alex are once again vacationing with Aunt Julia, this time in horse country, where the two young'uns are planning their wedding. Aunt J would love to join in but keeps getting distracted by weird threats delivered with the morning paper—and by the possibility that those threats are connected to a series of sinister accidents. Will this ugliness derail the nuptials, or does Sarah have the horse sense required to catch the culprit? You know the answer, but it’s heaps of fun getting there.