Bøger af Olivia Stowe

The sixth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds the retired FBI agent and her significant other, movie star Brenda Brandon, on the edge of the Florida Everglades to film a movie within a movie about an old movie. Brenda has taken a cameo role in the reprise of her first film experience, a Vietnam air war film of forty years earlier that was closed down by a brush with espionage, a murder, and the disappearance of the movie's star, White Orchid, factors that combined to pique the interest of the FBI. Charlotte has been hired as a technical consultant to help weave a blockbuster movie script out of the earlier, failed filming.When the mysteries of the earlier film come back to haunt the new film crew and cast after the crash of a company plane in the Everglades, Charlotte finds herself deputized by the FBI to figure out not only what happened then, but what is happening now-and why. In this, she receives the help of another technical expert on the film, Ed Winslow, who always seems to know more than he is revealing and who takes an interest in Charlotte that equals that of Charlotte's former lover and FBI contact, Evan Worthington, who wants Charlotte back in his life.As badly as Charlotte wants to unravel the mysteries of the lost White Orchid, an unknown someone seems even more determined to keep the past buried-even if it means that Charlotte needs to be buried as well.

A romantic mystery from best-selling author Olivia Stowe. The bombing of a U.S. embassy building in Amman, Jordan, has left cultural affairs officer, Ally Templeton, wounded, both physically and emotionally, and without a job and a fiance. On top of that, her eccentric, man-hater mother, Miranda, a former personal assistant to major symphony conductors, for the third time has tried to burn down the scaled-down replica of a Transylvanian castle she has been living in in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northern Virginia. Ally, still reeling from personal tragedy, returns to Virginia to a mother who is fading away, a mystery of disappearing men, and a rekindling of the question of who her father was. Determined to take control of her life, Ally decides to restore the castle and to do the contracting herself. Subcontracting, however, brings her a pair of men, one older and one younger, vying for her attention and affection, each of whom has issues of his own that threaten to entangle Ally ever deeper into increasingly more sinister mysteries.

In the fifth Charlotte Diamond mystery, the retired FBI investigator and her significant other, glamorous senior movie star Brenda Brandon (aka Boynton), return from a murder- and gem-theft-punctuated Christmas cruise down the Rhine River to confusion and catastrophe in their usually quiet retirement village of Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland. The wooded lot next door to Brenda's historical mansion, a lot that Brenda thought she owned, is being bulldozed by a New York construction firm for a mystery development. All of the homes and land from Charlotte's own riverside cottage to the end of their road are being leveled as well, including Charlotte's neighbors' house, and she has no idea where their dog sitter may have gone with their beloved dogs, Rocket and Sam. The two women and their previously sleepy riverside village are propelled into a hotbed of confusion, with disappearances and murder aplenty. Only Charlotte's experience and skills from her previous life in the FBI and the appearance of an old flame Charlotte has been trying to avoid because of mixed feelings enable them to start unraveling the mystery of what is happening with spymaster Win Engleton's property.

Savannah Time is a story of human caring, loyalty, inevitable change, bittersweet heartbreak, and hope, set in the lovely garden that is historic Savannah. In this follow-on to Chatham Square, the eclectic collection of residents of one of Savannah's original residential squares have moved along in the almost-glacial "Savannah time" pace of this southern city, although, for some, the concern is that the pace is going too fast-that inevitable unwanted change is in the air. Samantha, the little black girl with the deformed leg of the previous book, has grown to nearly her eighteenth birthday. The residents of the square who rallied to ensure she had the reconstructive operations she needed are, for the most part, now in need of nurturing attention themselves, and Samantha is providing the "Florence Nightingale" support they need. But Samantha is at a cross-roads in her life. She has long said she wanted to become a doctor, but as the time approaches for her to leave home in pursuit of that dream, she feels the pull to remain in Chatham Square to help her friends. Conflicted between what they want and what Samantha needs, her friends on the square fight to conquer their own fear of change for Samantha's sake. The doll maker, Ginny, who is the emotional "glue" for the residents of the square and employs Samantha as her assistant; Rose, the matriarch "queen of the square"; Arnie, the irascible but kindly super of Ginny and Samantha's apartment house; and the ailing bookstore pair, Tom and Edward, all have to bow to inevitable changes if Samantha is going to be set free. Added to the mix are two young men vying for Samantha's attention and a new resident to the square, a novelist on a mysterious mission.

The Christmas season is one of seconds: searching for just another second to be able to getting everything prepared, second helpings at the holiday table, second thoughts about what it all means and about relationships-and second chances to fulfill the meaningful in gift giving and relationships. Christmas Seconds offers up a five-story inspirational novella and five separate short stories exploring the theme of "seconds." The novella titled Christmas Seconds is of unexpected opportunities and second chances-and snowballing effects-as a young couple that has been blessed with health and security-and each other-is preparing to embark on a long-delayed honeymoon cruise at Christmas time. As they prepare, they and those they are encountering around them, discover that the true meaning and gift of the season is right there at home-and is in giving yourself away. The short story "Second Helping" is one of hearing the message and quietly responding. "Second Glance" is one of not looking in the right place for the spirit of Christmas-and thus possibly overlooking a treasure. "Second Christmas" stresses that the one getting the most presents isn't necessarily the happiest one, and, similarly, "Seconds" shows that heartfelt gifts may not be the showiest versions. The concluding story, "Second Job," is a celebration of appreciation in the true Christmas spirit. "Christmas Seconds" is Olivia's second book of inspirational stories reminding us of, and celebrating, the true spirit of Christmas, "Spirit of Christmas," also from Cyberworld Publishing, is the other.

Retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond is cajoled into taking a Christmas market Rhine river cruise with her partner, glamorous retired queen of the movie screen Brenda Brandon/Boynton. When Brenda invites Charlotte's doctor brother, Chance Diamond, and his minister wife, Marilyn, to join in the trip, Charlotte knows this will be no restful vacation. The "curse of Chance," the travels of whom have always been accompanied by a death or three, does indeed embroil Charlotte and her three travel companions in a complex mix of "inconvenient" robberies and suspicious deaths against a backdrop of quaint German towns, Christmas markets, and Rhine castles.The misadventure of the Rhine river cruise involves an international crime money-laundering Swiss banker and his Italian TV star wife; a "Jack Sprat" pair of elderly spinsters; a doll-fetish Japanese couple; a diamond-dripping, once-kidnapped heiress; a gay novelist and boyfriend; a catatonic mustard dynasty heiress; and assorted other unsavory characters. As the Rhine Maiden scenically chugs north from Nürnberg to Amsterdam over Christmas week, Charlotte and Brenda track their bet on whether the "curse of Chance" will meet its quota of mayhem, while Charlotte sinks deeper and deeper into what becomes a working vacation.The fourth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series.

The third Charlotte Diamond MysteryRetired FBI senior investigator Charlotte Diamond finds herself jetting from murder on one coast of the United States to kidnapping on another in attempts to save both her lover and her former husband. Charlotte follows her new-found companion, the leading movie actress, Brenda Brandon, to Hollywood. Brenda had abruptly abandoned Hollywood and the movies and returned to her hometown of Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. But a cameo movie role she cannot turn down returns her to the scene of an old murder, for which she now is the leading suspect. Barely having dealt with that mystery on the West Coast, Charlotte is called back to Ocean City, Maryland, where her former husband and his new gambling casino have been targeted by the mob, and his new wife kidnapped.Torn from West Coast to East Coast and thrown into the sphere of an even older and brighter flame than her former husband just when she had thought that her life was settling down, Charlotte is finding out that retirement looks a whole lot similar to when she was working on all cylinders at the FBI

The ninth Charlotte Diamond mystery finds retired FBI senior agent Charlotte Diamond contemplating too many coincidences in what should be two separate mysteries.The mysteries start with two murders and the uncovering of a illegal drug distribution ring in what should be a bucolic, out-of-the-way place, the Curtain Call movie folks retirement community in Hopewell on the Choptank in Maryland that Charlotte owns and operates with her spouse, movie top box-office star, Brenda Brandon. The drugs are distributed in plastic packets with a green palm tree embossed on them. When the two head south for Brenda's singing appearance at the annual Spoleto arts festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the same packets turn up there. The "too many coincidences" continue as the two women find themselves landing in danger by agreeing to stay during Brenda's Spoleto gig at a coastal tea plantation owned by an actress with whom Brenda had appeared in Hollywood movies.

In the seventh of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte and her significant other, box office senior movie star Brenda Boynton, return from a Florida Everglades movie shoot to an economically distressed village, Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay shore. A scheme by New Jersey mobsters to build an illegal casino resort has collapsed but not before half the village has been leveled and the local business owners have committed to overexpansion.Brenda comes with a saving plan to use lottery winnings to establish a retirement community for destitute movie industry retirees in the village. While both Brenda and Charlotte bring this plan to fruition, Charlotte contends with a flurry of auto thefts, a murderess on the loose, a sixty-year old bank heist buried treasure, the return of her former husband and his acidic mother, and a group of old movie folks so ungrateful and motivated by revenge that soon someone swings from a chandelier, threatening to return the village to chaos and Brenda and Charlotte's dreams to dust.

Eight stories woven around the mystery of the Bucks Elbow Mountain, Virginia, plane crash of 1963.In the early fall of 1963 both the Shenandoah National Park Service and the fire stations on the Virginia Piedmont plain on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains are called during a nighttime thunderstorm. A small forest fire, reportedly preceded by an explosion, has been observed on the eastern slope of Bucks Elbow Mountain, ten miles north on the Skyline Drive from where highway 250 crosses the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap.The rain is heavy and the site of the fire is remote. By the time the park rangers have descended to the burn area from the Turk Gap parking area and the firefighters have ascended to it, the fire has essentially been doused by the rain. What the crews find is the smoldering fuselage of a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron aircraft. In the smoldering wreckage are two bodies, later determined to be that of a man and a woman, burned beyond ready identification.No one reports missing a plane-or a man or woman for that matter-and no flight plan is on file for a Beechcraft Baron in the Central Virginia airspace for that night.What could be the story behind this crash?From this real scenario, which remains unsolved to this day, Olivia Stowe has woven eight separate short stories on events that fit the facts and that could plausibly explain what brought that plane and those two people to oblivion in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Preceding these stories is an additional story, "Fire on the Mountain," giving fictional accounts of the crash from the various perspectives of those on the ground that night.

It is seemingly a coincidence that master doll maker Ginny Standler inherits a co-op apartment fronting on the Chatham Square of Savannah, Georgia, from her Aunt Marie while simultaneously being offered an interim teaching position at Savannah's College of Art and Design. Both circumstances enable and propel her to escape the Fan district of Richmond, Virginia, and its constant reminders of a romance having gone disturbingly sour and giving Ginny pause to question her value system and relationships with others. Dropped unceremoniously in the quirky charm of Savannah's park-laced historical district-and most significantly into contact with the people who live and thrive in that environment-Ginny quickly becomes entwined with a grouchy recluse; a sour, erratic, and sometimes irrational bag lady; a young girl direly in need of healing; a young waiter laughing through his tears; a bitter poet; and a possible new love interest. And she just as quickly becomes embroiled in the individual letter-signaled mysteries of this set of characters that both repels and compels them one from another-but that somehow makes them a caring community. A community that Ginny comes to suspect her Aunt Marie has purposely enfolded her into to begin the healing in her own life. This charming and inspirational story reflects perfectly what makes the beautifully designed and peopled southern city of Savannah the special place that it is.

The Christmas season reawakens the desires and encouragement to give of oneself and to help others in need. This anthology includes fifteen inspirational and contemplative stories, written over the past couple of decades to follow themes of the Christmas cards the author crafted herself to send to friends and relatives. They provide an opportunity for those conflicted in various ways or swept up in the hustle and bustle of holiday routine to pause, contemplate, grasp, and be heartened and set in motion by the true spirit of the season. These stories share an element of unexpected gifts or struggling to "catch on" to what the season is all about and are great mood lifters for those who feel overwhelmed or marginalized by the commercialism and consumptiveness of Christmas.

When Charlotte Diamond retired to Diamond Cottage near Maryland's eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, she thought she had left her life of crime-solving it, that is-behind her, and is struggling to find a new purpose in life. But the small waterfront community of Hopewell on the Choptank, with its wealthy artistically inclined inhabitants, is hiding old crimes and dark secrets beneath its outward quiet and affluence.A surprising number of people from the community have intersecting pasts and dark secrets that Charlotte is unaware of and that become downright murderous, coming to a head when blockbuster movie actress, Brenda Brandon, arrives in the village in full retreat from a recent tragedy in her life. Brenda also brings unexpected romance into Charlotte's previously straight life. And Sam, the neglected husky who has attached himself to Charlotte, knows more about what is going on than he can tell her, even with his howling.

In the second of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, FBI senior investigator Charlotte has retired to Maryland's eastern shore of the Chesapeake bay only to find high-level international intrigue has sought her out when the abandoned sailboat of spy master Win Engleton washes up against her dock. Charlotte struggles with having to choose between focusing on her new-found significant other, former movie star Brenda Boynton, or a complex espionage mystery of who did what to who and why that reopens ever deeper mysteries again and again like a Matryoshka Russian nesting doll.

Skyline 2017, the fourth in a series of annual publisher's anthologies produced by Cyberworld Publishing, showcases the prose and poetry talents of Central Virginia writers. The title of the anthology is taken from the Skyline Drive, the parkway skipping along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and providing centering for the region in which the authors showcased here are living and writing. Thus far the editions have followed the seasons in cover image, with this being the summer edition. Other than the Skyline Summer contest works, there is no overarching theme for the short stories, poems, and essays in this anthology, so each can be discovered and appreciated on its own context and merits. Over half of the works found here won or placed in various Virginia regional and statewide writing contests between September 2015 and September 2016.

The tenth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series takes retired FBI agent Charlotte Diamond, and her spouse, movie star Brenda Brandon/Boynton, to an aging mountaintop palace in the Blue Ridge Mountains.Their late summer foursome vacation plans to bask on Hilton Head Island with Charlotte's brother, Williamsburg physician Chance Diamond, and his Methodist minister wife, Marilyn, are scotched by an approaching hurricane. And Charlotte becomes embroiled in the reopening of the drug distribution operation she encountered in the last book in the series, Follow the Palm. Before plans can be made on a substitute vacation, an unwelcome college mate of Charlotte and Marilyn's, Regina Fowler, stumbles in to beg Charlotte to come up to the ancestral home, Fowler's Folly, she owns with two cousins, to stop a drug operation, dramatically dropping a cocaine packet with the same logo on it as in the case Charlotte thought had just been solved.Once arriving at Fowler's Folly and stuck there because the hurricane they were avoiding in Hilton Head veered to the Blue Ridge Mountains instead, Charlotte and family are guided by a clairvoyant into uncovering multiple mysteries.In a bonus short story, Blessedly Cursed Christmas, set the following Christmas season at Curtain Call, the movie colony retirement community Brenda and Charlotte are developing on the riverbank of Maryland's Choptank River, the couple finds they are battling Mother Nature again-this time in the form of a relentless snowfall.Motivated by the need to encourage residents to have the will to live through a season that is as challenging as joyful for the elderly and lonely and also by the wish to integrate the retirement home into the village better, Brenda and Charlotte decide to bring in best friends and favorite relatives for each resident for a surprise Christmas Eve party. The plans are heartfelt, but they also are ambitious, and the weather has plans that challenge them at every step.Will Curtain Call get its Christmas miracle?