Akron Public Library

Lee McKinney Woodyard, busy owner of Warner Pier's famous chocolate shop TenHuis Chocolade, is considering accepting a position on the town's library board. To help her decide, she goes to the historic library to check out the board's monthly meeting but someone has placed murder on the agenda. The discovery of the body of a retiring board member brings the meeting to a halt. Suddenly, everyone in attendance is a suspect in her murder.

Tenhuis Chocolade is wall-to-wall with chocolate hearts for Valentine's Day. But owner Lee McKinney Woodyard is getting no love from private detective Derrick Valentine. He's looking for one of their new employees--a woman Lee and her Aunt Nettie have been harboring for an organization that aids abused women in escaping their tormentors. Luckily, they manage to not spill the cocoa beans and clue him in. But the situation turns into a complex confection...

Chocolate-shop manager Lee McKinney has had enough of party planner Julie Singletree's cutesy e-mails. Then somebody actually kills the woman, putting everyone on her mailing list on edge. As their connections to the murder emerge, so do more attacks. Lee smells a rat-and it's not made of chocolate. And if she doesn't want to be permanently deleted, it's up to her to trap it.

"Revenge is sweet for a killer on the loose-and it all started with the murder of Warner Pier's most hated clown.... Everyone who knew the bozo wanted him dead. Odd, then, that a complete stranger was accused of bursting Moe Davidson's balloons. But it's been a month since the miserable shop owner of Clowning Around was killed, and everybody's moving on, including Lee Woodyard. Her chocolate shop, TenHuis Chocolade, is next door to Moe's shuttered...

David Loogan, who's recently moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., has stumbled into an editing job for Gray Streets, a mystery magazine, after anonymously submitting a short story. One night, Loogan's boss, Tom Kristoll, asks him for help in disposing of a corpse. Loogan goes to Kristoll's house and does so, despite his suspicions that Kristoll's account of how the man ended up dead is incomplete at best. When Kristoll later dies in a fall from his office window,...