Grand Slam Murders (A Bridge to Death Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Publisher: Kensington (January 29, 2019)
Paperback: 304 pages

Synopsis

After four bridge players are poisoned, newspaper reporter Wendy Winchester sets out to catch a killer who’s not playing with a full deck . . .

When the four wealthy widows who make up the venerable Rosalie Bridge Club never get up from their card table, this quiet Mississippi town has its first quadruple homicide. Who put cyanide in their sugar bowl? An aspiring member and kibitzer with the exclusive club, Wendy takes a personal interest in finding justice for the ladies.

She also has a professional motivation. A frustrated society columnist for the Rosalie Citizen, she’s ready to deal herself a better hand as an investigative reporter. This could be her big break. Plus, she has a card or two up her sleeve: her sometimes boyfriend is a detective and her dad is the local chief of police.

Partnering up with the men in her life, Wendy starts shuffling through suspects and turning over secrets long held close to the chest by the ladies. But when a wild card tries to take her out of the game, Wendy decides it’s time to up the ante before she’s the next one to go down . . .

Guest Post

Hello, Mystery Readers!  My name is Wendy Lyons Winchester, and I am in the midst of a quadruple homicide investigation.  But I’m not a police detective—I’m a newspaper reporter in my hometown of Rosalie, Mississippi, an eccentric and multi-layered, historic Mississippi River port.  Three  years ago I returned to my hometown of Rosalie with a journalism degree from Mizzou and took the only newspaper position available to me at the time: writing the social column.  Which is another way of saying I do fluff pieces on weddings, baby showers and sip ‘n sees.  It is way past time for me to move on.  (If I have to describe another bouquet, I will hurl!)

Unfortunately, the four wealthy widows who comprised the exclusive Rosalie Bridge Club were all recently poisoned during one of their bridge luncheons.  Someone stirred cyanide-laced sugar into their coffees, and they were all DOA at the Rosalie General Hospital.  The town was shaken to its roots, and I was among the most traumatized.  The Gin Girls, as they had nicknamed themselves due to their fondness for the juniper berry brew, had recently admitted me to the club as a fledgling member, and I was slowly learning the fine points of the social game of bridge in my spare time.

Thinking on my feet, I went to my impossibly-sexist editor, Dalton Hemmings, and proposed that he allow me to do a series of features on the ladies and their families.  He approved the assignment, but what he doesn’t know is that I plan to do enough research to solve these crimes myself, and then Mr. Hemmings will have to consider giving me a promotion to full-time investigative reporter.  I also have an advantage in that my father, Bax, is chief of police, and my sometimes boyfriend, Ross, is a police detective.  I expect a leak or two from their official investigation to fall from their lips in my daily encounters with them.

I invite you to follow me as I question one suspect after another and eventually figure out the monstrous solution to these Grand Slam Murders when the Rosalie Police Department cannot.

About the Author

R. J. Lee follows in the mystery-writing footsteps of his father, R. Keene Lee, who wrote fighter pilot and detective stories for Fiction House, publishers of WINGS Magazine and other ‘pulp fiction’ periodicals in the late ’40’s and ’50’s. Lee was born and grew up in the Mississippi River port of Natchez but also spent thirty years living in the Crescent City of New Orleans. A graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee) where he studied creative writing under Sewanee Review editor, Andrew Lytle, Lee now resides in Oxford, Mississippi.

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