Hall, best known for his Edgar-nominated Stanley Hastings series, begins a new series with a heroine who provides an interesting variation on the older woman sleuth. Imagine Miss Marple as a promiscuous lush, and you have Cora Felton, known to crossword puzzle buffs around the country as "The Puzzle Lady." Cora and her niece, Sherry Carter, have moved to the small town of Bakerhaven, Conn., hoping to protect Sherry from an abusive ex-husband. The...

Bakerhaven, Connecticut, seems like the ideal place to host a charity crossword-puzzle tournament-after all, the town is home to Cora Felton, the beloved puzzle columnist known as the Puzzle Lady. A slew of celebrity contestants are on the way, and the locals have been invited to challenge the veteran puzzlers head-on. But the town's attention is fixated on something far more gripping than crosswords when the body of the town tart is discovered lying...

Cora Felton contemplates wedded bliss once again when she is courted by distinguished widower Raymond Harstein III, a relationship that is overshadowed by the arrival of cautionary cryptograms in the mail.

"Cora Felton may look like everyone's favorite grandmother. But the white-haired, bespectacled Puzzle Lady swears, smokes, gambles, and is even dodgy on the subject of how many husbands she's had. So it strikes her long-suffering niece Sherry Carter as amusing when Cora announces, "I'm tired of living a lie!"" "The inspiration for this sudden burst of honesty is a promotion by Granville Grains featuring the Puzzle Lady on a bus tour of televised personal...

Hired to write a book on sudoku, Cora Felton, the Puzzle Lady, is baffled by the arrival of two rival Japanese publishers who are vying for her services, a situation that becomes increasingly complicated by the lengths to which the men will go to beat each other.

After she accidentally frames her nemesis--Minami, the Sudoku Lady--for a murder at which a Sudoku puzzle was left at the scene, Cora Felton must clear her rival's name and trap the real killer.

Stumbling over a murder scene while making a blackmail payment for a young attorney, Cora Felton's efforts to solve the crime put her in the path of a killer who may be targeting her niece and her niece's new baby.

"When young attorney Becky Balwin hires Cora Felton to accompany her to New York City to meet a new client in his penthouse apartment, the Puzzle Lady jumps at the chance. Cora is just coming off a bad breakup, and finding out that Chief Harper testified at a parole hearing for a killer she helped put away, has her feeling old. But when she and Becky arrive at the apartment, they find the man is dead. There's a puzzle on his chest, and a prowler is...

"Presumed Puzzled is the latest mystery from Parnell Hall featuring the delightfully charming fraud Cora Felton. The Puzzle Lady gets more than she bargained for when she's hired to track down Paula Martindale's straying husband. Cora Felton finds him hacked to pieces on his living room rug, while his blood-drenched wife haunts the crime scene clutching a butcher knife. It's a tough spot for attractive young attorney Becky Baldwin. Paula is presumed...