Voice recognition mistake of the day: “Nearly all Tule Publishing mysteries are on sale! This a great chance to pick up a bunch of nude mysteries at a discount...” 😳😆I meant “new mysteries”

Cute boys

A friend and I visited the Hammel Museum, a former brewery in central New Mexico, for Oktoberfest. This wasn’t the model for the Banditt Museum in the book, but it has a similar vibe: cluttered with random stuff!

I have lots of great deals to share this week so let’s get to them! (I also have another excerpt from A Stone Cold Murder below, if you want to skip ahead to that. The photos in the excerpt are also from the Hammel.)

Book Deals!

Tule Mystery Month Sale: Nearly all mystery ebooks from Tule Publishing are priced at only $1.99 on Amazon this month! (Exceptions: October releases and books with other promos right now.) That means you can grab the entire Accidental Detective series for $12.95 total, and the two Reluctantly Psychic Murder Mysteries for $1.99 each! See all my sale books on Amazon or check out all the Tule mysteries. (Click the blue text; image is not linked.)

Sorry this is Amazon only; I don’t make those decisions. But Something Shady at Sunshine Haven is free in e-book everywhere, until October 14! Book 2 is $1.99, book 3 is $2.99, and book 4 is $3.99. Books 5 and 6 are at the usual price of $4.99. So you can still get the whole series for $18.95 in e-book anywhere else. Find the series everywhere. The audiobook is 70% off at Audiobooks, so now $6.

Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense Sales Promotion: If you like book covers with spooky houses off in the distance, you'll find them here! Not to mention dangerous bodies of water, a cliff edge, and even a time machine. Get your mysteries and thrillers, most under $5.

Clean Romance Deals: Whether you want country boys or city girls, second chances or fake relationships, grumpy or sunshine, cats or dogs, you’ll find something sweet and relaxing in this bunch, most under $5, some just 99 cents, (or even free, like my series starter, Coffee and Crushes at the Cat Café!).

Zoraida Grey and the Family Stones by S.K. Dubois: My exclusive paranormal mystery giveaway this month is from author S.K. Dubois. “How

many Scottish witches does it take to stop one small-town fortune teller? Granny’s dying, but Zoraida can save her with a magic crystal of smoky quartz. Too bad the crystal is in Scotland––in a haunted castle––guarded by mind-reading, psychopathic sorcerers. Up to their necks in family intrigue and smack-dab in the middle of a simmering clan war, Zoraida and her best friend Zhu discover Granny hasn’t told them everything. Not by a long shot.” Free with newsletter signup! 

A Stone Cold Murder excerpt Chapter 3 (part 2)

  [In the Reluctant Psychic Mystery series, a quirky loner who can read the history of any object with her touch gets drawn into mysteries at the museum of oddities where she works. Petra is talking to her new boss, museum founder Peyton Banditt.]

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. I could think of many things I wanted to say— What happened in this office? Why is everyone so friendly to me but indifferent about a man who died? Did Reggie Heap really die of a heart attack, or was he hit by a very pretty cluster of fluorite crystals? Is this museum a hotbed of . . . I don’t even know what.

  Did you lure me here to be the next victim?

  But I couldn’t say any of that. Best case scenario, Peyton Banditt wouldn’t know the answers, and I’d sound like I was having a psychotic break. If he could answer those questions, then he was dangerous, and I didn’t want him to know I suspected anything.

  “In any case, I just stopped by to make sure you didn’t need anything, and to see if you’d care to join Mrs. Banditt and myself for lunch. My treat.” He beamed.

  What was this obsession everyone had with lunch? Did I look malnourished? Was working in the museum so dull that the staff scheduled their days around their lunch break?

  “Thank you, that’s very kind.”

  It was harder turning down my boss’s invitation than one that came from coworkers. But I had to, since I’d already told Liberty and Haven I had plans, and I really did need to check on my animals. Plus, I desperately needed a break from people, especially these friendly strangers poking at my walls. If I didn’t shore up those barricades, someone might find a gap to break through. I needed to surround myself with purring cats and squeaking guinea pigs and calm the heck down so I could figure out what to do.

  “Perhaps another time though?” I suggested. “I have pets who are probably also feeling overwhelmed by the move. I ought to check on them.”

  He nodded. “Of course. Later this week then. I trust the house is satisfactory?”

  “It’s great.” Finally I could say something honestly and with warmth. “Thank you for connecting me with the owner.”

  “Oh, I was delighted to do you both a favor. Shelley’s an old friend.”

  It truly was a great house, old and rather shabby but big, with three bedrooms and a yard. And I was paying less in rent than I had for my tiny apartment near Seattle. I hadn’t thought to question why it was available. Rent might be cheap here, but there probably wasn’t a lot of turnover. Was I living in Reggie Heap’s old place? I didn’t want to ask, in case my interest in Reggie started to seem suspicious.

  Peyton paced the tiny room, his gaze flickering over the half-empty shelves, the box of mineral samples, the filing cabinets stuffed so full drawers couldn’t close. He touched the fluorite crystals again, shifting the sample slightly on the shelf. Was his attention to it suspicious? Or did he simply like things tidy, and the purple crystals were bright enough to catch his attention?

  “Forget what I said about the new collection. I’m not expecting you to get everything under control this week.” He beamed a Santa Claus smile. “Someone young and energetic! That’s just what this position needs.”

  My hands and arms ached. Anxiety filled my head, jumbling my thoughts so I couldn’t get words out. Who said young people had all the energy?

  “What do you intend to do with those?” He gestured toward the box of smaller rocks and minerals I’d pulled from the shelves.

  “Clean them, for starters. Is there a hose somewhere I can use to get the dust off?”

  “Oh, you haven’t seen the workroom yet! Come with me.”

  I scrambled to follow him out of the office. He turned left and went through a door I hadn’t noticed yet. To get to the big room that was now my domain, I’d walked through a dozen other rooms and narrow passages. Even the latter were lined with glass cases full of less valuable artifacts—someone’s donated BB gun collection, Barbies through the ages, reproduction Wanted posters of the Wild West. It seemed the Banditt Museum had never met a donation it didn’t deem worthy of putting on display.

  It turned out this door, maybe fifteen feet from my office, led directly outside. Peyton nudged a rock with his foot to block the door open.

  I stepped out behind the museum. The building surrounded three sides of the yard, but not in a nice U shape. Rather, pieces of building jutted out seemingly at random. Clearly the museum had once been much smaller, and rooms had been added on as needed, without a master plan—unless the master plan was Build something that looks like it was constructed by drunken gremlins working in the dark from upside down blueprints. A chain-link fence closed off the fourth side of the yard, with hardpacked dirt on our side and weeds and bushes beyond.

  The yard itself was cluttered with old farming and mining equipment, plus a couple of vehicles that must not have been interesting enough to make it into the exhibit room filled with classic cars and horse-drawn wagons. It was still nice to be outside, away from the office that had turned claustrophobic with the echoes of violence. I breathed deeply of the warm, dry air and tipped my face to catch the sun.

  I groped for something to say. “Can I use this door as a shortcut to my office?”

  “You can come out this way, but it locks automatically, so you’ll have to prop it open to return that way. Obviously I’d prefer you only do that if you stay close. I believe Reggie stepped out to smoke sometimes.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Very wise.”

  He strode to the next piece of jutting building, unlocked a door, and flicked on the lights as we stepped inside. We were in a room about twenty feet by forty feet, with no other doors or windows, unless they were hidden behind the floor-to-ceiling metal shelves filled with boxes and unidentifiable objects. A long row of metal tables ran down the center of the room, and a big utility sink sat near the door.

  “This is where we store donations until someone has time to sort them and decide what goes on display,” Peyton said. “If we get donations that aren’t suitable for the museum, we sell them. We have a few people on call who specialize in particular artifacts—old license plates, neon signs, and so forth—and twice a year we have a big antique sale.”

  He started down the room. “Our recent geological donation is here in the back.”

  A section of shelves was crammed with cardboard boxes with the word Geo scribbled in black ink. Some boxes were collapsing under the weight of the ones on top of them. Good thing most rocks and minerals are fairly sturdy. If those boxes contained any delicate samples, I hoped they’d been packed with padding.

  “I expect you’ll spend most of your time back here for a while,” Peyton said. “It might take a couple of months to sort all this.”

  Good, that was almost realistic. During our interview, he’d mentioned a big recent donation that needed to be sorted. I hadn’t imagined this.

  “You can clean things at the sink and decide what should go on display,” he said. “Choose what to pull from the current collection to make room. Set aside anything to be sold. Perhaps you know a good way to sell rocks?”

  I nodded. “It’ll probably be worth setting up a table at some rock and mineral shows to start. If we price things reasonably, we can reduce inventory a lot over a weekend. Then how about having small samples for sale in the museum? A lot of kids love pretty rocks.”

  “See!” Peyton beamed and patted my back. “That’s the kind of creative thinking we need here.”

  Other mineral museums did that, but if he wanted to think I was brilliant . . .

  “Consider this room your domain for the foreseeable future. Let’s see, it’s almost March, so you’ll have about two months before it’s too hot to work out here.”

  Expect overwhelming heat by May. Good to know.

  Peyton strode back down the room. “I think Reggie got started.” He stopped where a box sat on the table with a few mineral samples next to it and more inside. “Looks like he didn’t get very far. Poor fellow.” Peyton heaved a sigh. “Well, he’s in a better place now, I hope.”

  He hoped? Was that doubt about an afterlife, or concern over which direction Reggie might have gone? 

***

More of the cute boys:

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