Armoires and Arsenic (Darling Valley Cozy Mystery #1)

What would you do if you sent a $30,000 piece of furniture out for repair and it came back with a deadly package inside?

That’s the dilemma facing Olivia M. Granville, OMG to her friends and foes, as though the award-winning architect, interior designer and antiques dealer didn’t have enough on her hands.

Olivia, a transplanted Los Angeleno, is the newest resident of Darling Valley, a picturesque town just outside of San Francisco and home of the DV Bills, as Olivia calls the largest concentration of billionaires anywhere in the country. Like the Astors and Rockefellers of old who outdid each other building humongous summer cottages in Newport, the DV Bills outdo each other with eye-popping piles of sticks stuffed with museum quality art hidden in the Marin hills. It was Olivia’s plan to make a killing decorating them.

What Olivia liked best about moving to sleepy Darling Valley from LA was the absence of crime. No worrying about parking her car on a side street because it might get stolen. Nobody slipping sticky fingers into her purse and lifting her wallet while an accomplice distracted her at the sale rack at Neiman’s. Not having to trip over a dead body blocking the doorway of her office building while the LAPD took their sweet time locking down the crime scene. But the best part of living in Darling Valley was never having to find herself sitting across from Brooks at a dinner party while he romanced his new girlfriend and referred to Olivia as a client.

What she hated about Darling Valley was the 400 miles between its pristine mansions and gritty but happening LA. Not far enough to save her from becoming Detective Gurmeet Richards’ lead suspect in a killing of a different kind. Yes, that’s Detective Richards of the devastating velvety eyes.

Olivia should have remembered the advice her tea-leaves reading friend, Tuesday, gave her before she left LA. You get what you resist.

Watch what happens when Olivia and Tuesday get to work proving her innocence amid the opulence and deception of her, idyllic but deadly new home.