New parents Holly White and Sheriff Evan Gray are sleep deprived but incandescently happy to be celebrating their baby’s first Christmas. Their family, friends, and neighbors are spoiling the newest addition. Adding to the perfect holiday season is the recent completion of their newly built home. All that’s left to do is move in and send off those change-of-address cards. But their cup full of cheer turns sour when Holly discovers a dead body.
It all started with a sweet trip down memory lane—Candy Cane Lane and Toyland were two of Holly’s favorites as a child, and she had been looking forward to sharing them with her baby. Then she stumbled upon the body of Greysen, the animal keeper, left among the reindeer at the petting zoo.
Earlier in the day, Holly witnessed a fight between Greysen and a stranger. Stranger still, the reindeer petting zoo had originally been empty that day—no reindeer in sight until they reappeared along with a corpse.
As Holly fights to keep the Christmas spirit alive, she is Greysen’s only chance at justice—and her baby’s only chance at a happy first Christmas.
DECK THE HALLS WITH BOUGHS OF MURDER (Christmas Tree Farm Mystery Book #7) by Jacqueline Frost is back for a highly anticipated annual holiday visitation with Holly, her family, and friends in Mistletoe, Maine and of course the annual murder. This is a series that I recommend is read in order of publication because the lives of the characters are continually evolving and they make this series so endearing that you want to follow their lives besides also including a good cozy mystery murder.
Holly White-Gray and husband Sheriff Evan Gray are sleep deprived but looking forward to their baby, Joy’s first Christmas in their newly built home on Holly’s family’s Christmas Tree Farm. Holly has been doing her best in her attempts to stay out of other people’s intrigues, but as she is taking Joy on her first trip to a childhood amusement park, she witnesses an argument. When she and her sister-in-law return later to look for the family heirloom gloves Joy lost, they discover one of the men from the argument dead in the reindeer pen.
No matter how hard she tries, Holly “The Gumdrop Gumshoe” is once again in search of a killer even as the stakes are so much higher this year with a new baby to keep safe.
I love this cozy mystery series so much and while the amateur murder investigation is always well plotted with plenty of red herrings, it is the wonderfully endearing characters that I look forward to catching up with every year. The love of family and friends, the settings, and the time of year puts you in the mood to celebrate yourself. While a murder is investigated and solved in each book, the author is still able to instill humor and fun throughout with witty dialogue and the Reindeer Games on the tree farm.
I highly recommend this enchanting addition to the Christmas Tree Farm cozy mystery series and look forward to many more to come.
***
About the Author
Jacqueline Frost is a mystery-loving pet enthusiast who hopes to make readers smile. She lives in rural Ohio with her husband and three spunky children. Jacqueline is a member of the International Thriller Writers (ITW) and Sisters in Crime (SinC).
Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AVALON MOON by Michael Amos Cody on this Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tour.
Below you will find a book description, my book review, an excerpt from the book, the author’s bio and social media links, and a PICT giveaway. Enjoy!
***
Book Description
In Avalon Moon, a local man has gone missing and then is soon found dead in a highland meadow, side-by-side with an unknown woman. When another man and woman go missing and a female deputy is found murdered, Gabriel Tanner, editor of Runion’s weekly newspaper, and Plumer Reeves, a reclusive local hawkshaw working for the niece of the first dead man, suspect a monster is hunting in their western North Carolina mountains. Two extraordinary young women, the Avalon community’s Ariel Anderson and Lonesome Mountain’s Livvy Goforth, join Tanner and Reeves to lead the attempt to discover and stop the killer.
Genre: Psychological Horror, Thriller Published by: Madville Publishing Publication Date: May 19, 2026 Number of Pages: 340 ISBN: 9781963695670 (ISBN10: 1963695674)
***
My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
AVALON MOON by Michael Amos Cody is an atmospheric Southern Gothic genre mash-up that seamlessly blends horror, mystery, suspense, and crime thriller into a book that captivates and engages.
Gabriel Tanner owns, edits, and writes for the local paper in Runion, North Carolina. As he is putting information about a missing woman in the paper, he is called to photograph a crime scene. What he discovers at the scene are the remains of a man and a woman. At about the same time, a young mountain woman, Livvy Goforth, has asked Plumer Reeves, a local hawkshaw, who finds missing things, including people, to find her uncle, who she knows is dead. More people disappear and the community begins to realize they have an unknow killer in their mountains and everyone must work together before more end up dead, including themselves.
Set in the mountains of Madison County in western North Carolina and featuring a mix of social class protagonists, this author’s writing pulled me right into the intensifying suspense, and beauty of the location. Paranormal elements and folklore traditions are woven throughout the plot, but do not overtake the plausibility of the crime plot.
I am very glad to have joined this book tour, because I probably would not have been aware of this book otherwise and that would have been a terrible shame. I highly recommend this Southern Gothic mash-up genre book and hope many more people discover it!
***
Excerpt
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
ONE
Gabriel Tanner
“Editor of and chief contributor to a country weekly” never made my top ten list of things I wanted to be when I grew up. For the longest time, I had only one item on that list—Rock Star! I toyed with adding a second item, maybe being just a hit-making songwriter, but the songwriting I did throughout the 1980s was so closely bound up with the Rock Star! idea that I couldn’t pull the two apart. If I didn’t become the next Bruce Springsteen, which I didn’t, I was unlikely to become the next Bob McDill—ditto on the didn’t.
So, with the Rock Star! phase of my life gone grumbling into my dreams, I left Nashville in the hot gut of August 1990, retreated, tail between legs, to Runion, my hometown in the North Carolina mountains, and the following January entered Runion State University, where I double-majored in English and Journalism. I took a part-time job as student reporter and all-around grunt for Sheldon Dean’s Runion Recorder. A couple years after I graduated, Sheldon decided he was tired of writing and offered me a full-time position as editor, keeping only the title of “General Manager” for himself. I accepted.
And so it came to pass that on a cold evening in early March, on the darker side of twilight, I drove toward the Lonesome Mountain end of Genesis Road, planning to swing around the back way into Runion. On regular mornings going to work, or any other time I was in a hurry, I drove down to the French Broad end of Genesis and took the river road up a short hill and onto Main Street, but I was dreading two hours minimum of sitting in a meeting at the Madison County Cooperative Extension Office complex, housed in the recently renovated Old Mill on Mill Street, and taking notes for a regular report to appear in next week’s paper. The room would be stuffy with heat and humanity, and to be honest, I was lollygagging.
This year’s March was looking like a lion-lamb version—in like a lion, out like a lamb. We expected to wake up the next morning to some serious snow and ice courtesy of Winter Storm Ulysses. The fields on my left and the woods on my right seemed to hold their breath in anticipation.
I rolled to a stop at the T-intersection where Genesis Road dead-ends at Jewel Hill Road, with Lonesome Mountain ahead and to my left, dark against the sky. My new Honda hybrid sat quietly, and still not used to its workings, I thought it might have died but relaxed when no warning lights appeared. Even though the temperature was in the upper thirties, I opened my windows and—with no other traveler sitting at my bumper and politely honking, as our mountain folk do—sat at the intersection with my eyes closed and my skin alive to the chilly air. I heard a few of last summer’s still-tethered leaves shivering in the boughs overhead and something scurrying through the underbrush in the woods off to my right. I think I could’ve engaged the emergency brake and gone to sleep, but I opened my eyes, suddenly uneasy and unsure why.
The headlights shown across Jewel Hill Road and lit the lower part of a hillside pasture beyond. A few head of cattle midway up the slope stood at the edge of the light and grazed on pale grass.
Not one to be unnerved by a bovine presence in the twilight, I strained my senses to catch and identify what raised hairs along my forearms and around the back of my neck.
To my left, a field rolled away in successive swells toward a wooded ridge standing blackly against the sky. Runion lay on the other side of that ridge, but somewhere between the town and me, yips and cries rose from the gathering dark. These joined together into an eerie howl of various voices that twisted around one another, broke apart, and swelled together again.
Coyotes.
When I was growing up in these mountains, coyotes existed only in old TV westerns. But they were voice-over actors only, strictly behind-the-scenes. They were soundtrack features. Technicians of ambiance. Nothing said a cowboy was alone in the darkening wilderness like the distant howl of a coyote. The cowboy would raise his eyes from the campfire and sit still and listen for a moment, alert to the wild. But it was never the coyote itself that frightened him. Maybe the coyote’s cry was a reminder of his loneliness and vulnerability—that if such a critter could be out there in the dark, then anything could be out there.
But in recent years, coyotes had loped out of the faded glory of Hollywood’s western and into our world, maybe crossing the Mississippi around Memphis and moving steadily east across Tennessee until they reached Appalachia and Runion. They were seen trotting along the edges of regional four-lanes or lying dead on twisting mountain highways. They stole cats and small dogs just beyond the lights of back porches. That evening at the stop sign, they yipped and yapped and cried somewhere out on the verge of a Runion farmer’s field.
Still, I thought, at least they aren’t wolves. Wolves, of course, were a different story. Send up the howl of a wolf into the night, and the cowboy would become focused on the beast, not on loneliness or vulnerability. The wolf’s howl menaced, threatened. Eyes might shine at the edge of the campfire’s light, followed by snarling close-ups. Then enter the legend of the wolf mixed with a man, and the beast achieved cinematic glory, jumping genres from westerns to horror, something coyotes could never quite pull off.
When I pressed the accelerator, the Honda whispered to life, and I turned left toward town. If I sat there much longer, I would be late for the extension meeting, during which one item on the agenda just happened to be related to the beasts of my T-intersection musing. . . .
***
Author Bio
Michael Amos Cody is author of the 2017 novel GABRIEL’S SONGBOOK and the 2021 collection A TWILIGHT REEL, winner of the Short Story category in the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022. His 2025 literary suspense novel STREETS OF NASHVILLE won the Thriller category in the 2026 Independent Press Awards. His new novel, released in May 2026, is the psychological thriller AVALON MOON. Cody lives with wife Leesa in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and teaches early American literature and creative writing in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
She finds sisterhood in the Amish Widows Club–but will she risk loving again?
Leanna Mast never imagined she’d be a widow at forty-one, but it seems God had other plans. After mourning her husband for a year, she realizes it’s time to start living again. But her community expects her to remarry, and after living on her own, she’s not eager to start cooking and cleaning in another man’s home.
When she’s invited to join the Amish Widows Club, she discovers a place of belonging she didn’t even know she needed. In this group of women who support one another through sharing books, stories, and companionship, Leanna immediately feels welcome. She’s sure her life as a widow will bring her the fulfillment she craves . . . until handsome, kind Evan Keim comes calling. As their relationship deepens, her heart becomes involved. But how could she possibly leave the widows club for a dream that might be too good to be true?
***
Elise’s Thoughts
The Unexpected Caller by Shelley Shepard Gray is like all the other books she writes; they never disappoint. The story is filled with patience, loneliness, heartbreak, and love.
Leanna Mast never imagined she’d be a widow at forty-one, but it seems God had other plans. After mourning her husband for a year, she realizes it’s time to start living again. But her community expects her to remarry, and after living on her own, she’s not eager to start cooking and cleaning in another man’s home.
When she’s invited to join the Amish Widows Club, she discovers a place of belonging she didn’t even know she needed. In this group of women who support one another through sharing books, stories, and companionship, Leanna immediately feels welcome. She’s sure her life as a widow will bring her the fulfillment she craves until handsome, kind Evan Keim comes calling. As their relationship deepens, her heart becomes involved. She is conflicted about leaving the club or getting into a relationship with Evan.
The story is engaging and readers will have a hard time putting this book down. It is a story that will make readers forget their troubles as they take a journey with the characters.
***
Author Interview
Elise Cooper: Idea for the series?
Shelley Shepard Gray: I wrote all three books back-to-back to back with the three finished. I was in the whole world for about a year, and then, it was done. I am friends with a lady, who became a widow, maybe five years ago, and her husband had been in hospice for a long time. After he passed away, she felt like she had her life back, because she had been nursing him, and always needed to put his needs first, which is, of course, what you do with someone you love. After a year or so, it was a delight to see her, be excited to go out to eat, or to go with her girlfriends, or someone would say, ‘Well, let’s go do this little tour for the weekend.’ She could do things, and she had said something to me once about, ‘I think I almost took my friends for granted. I just really appreciate what I have with these other ladies that have been in the same position I’ve been in.’ So that just always kind of stuck with me. People think the Amish rules are, if you’re a widow, you must remarry right away, or you’re going to be mourning and sitting alone and wearing black nonstop. I have a feeling, if I was an Amish widow, and under the right circumstances, maybe I would want to go do stuff too. I thought it would be kind of a fun thing just to focus on friendships as much as a romance.
EC: What do you want to say about the Amish Widows Club?
SSG: Just because someone is driving a buggy and doesn’t have electricity, they don’t want the same thing that every other woman does, which is camaraderie, friendship, sisterhood. To have people that have your back. That is why I made up this lady, Doreen, who appears at the people’s houses at the beginning of every novel. At first, I wanted it to be completely secret. Like, nobody knew about it unless you’re a widow, and my editors didn’t like it being completely secret. And they are of different ages and are from different classes. These widows have a lot in common. They’ve gone through either a husband’s sudden death, or a long illness, or they’re suddenly alone. They don’t know how to go through life just by themselves.
EC: It was tough for the main character, Leanna, who had to choose between Evan or the club?
SSG: If you are married, or in a serious relationship, then maybe you don’t have that need as much as these widows do. And so, I like that idea, too, that it’s kind of you’re invited in, and if you decide to leave, or if you decide to get married, then you’re invited to leave. Leanna had a tough time deciding between the comradery of Evan or the one with this group.
EC: What do you want to say about her late husband, Willis?
SSG: He made her feel isolated, empty, depressed, and vulnerable. And she felt helpless, overwhelmed, and dejected around him. She felt like she had to get married and thought it was going to be better than it was. She had no choice, and she kind of was like, ‘This is my bed, and I’m resigned.’
EC: How would you describe Leanna?
SSG:The Unexpected Caller, has one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written to start a book, and I thought it summed it up, because the first line is, ‘she was so tired of being nice.’ And I really liked that about her. I thought she had a secret spunk, with a backbone in there somewhere. She just had to find it. And as she found her strength, she had to come to terms with it. I found a lot of value in her growth.
EC: What role did Doreen, the head of the Widows Club, play?
SSG: She was a force of nature. She was just a woman with a goal. She decided this is something that’s needed, and I’m going to form it. I liked that about her. And I saw, in a way, a little bit of me, and because I love books. Well, I’m kind of timid by nature, but I was a teacher for a long time, and I love a good schedule, and I love rules. I’m the best rule follower I know. I guess I channeled a little bit of her, a little bit of me into her, that, you know, she wanted to do this club, and she was going do this club her way. And she was the captain of it who handpicked people that she thought would be good in it. She didn’t ask every woman who was widowed to be part of it. I liked how spunky she was. And opinionated, and she didn’t really apologize. I even have her living so far out. She is not in a church district, so she goes to all different kinds of church districts. I mean, there’s just nothing about her in the norm. But she got along with everyone.
EC: What about the male lead, Evan?
SSG: He was kind, suave, debonair, and attentive. I loved all the scenes with his boys. I love the interaction with them. I liked how all the boys were so different, and he accepted who they were.
EC: What about the relationship between Evan and Leanna?
SSG: The main issue was she wanted to have a child, and he felt like, ‘no, I’ve been there, done that.’ I tried to have multiple conflicts. After his wife passed away, he’s kind of lonely. As for her, once she started falling in love with him and his family, she started learning more about herself, that it was okay to want things, ‘Well, I’m young enough to still have a baby. What if I have a baby? I would like this to happen one day.’ Then I wanted her to be able to voice that, and I didn’t want her to be afraid to say, ‘Oh, well, you don’t want this. Well, okay,’ because that would be right back where she was before, where she didn’t feel like she had a voice in the marriage. They both were smitten with each other, but there was this tension, and problems that they didn’t want to overlook for a while. I thought it was partly because of their ages, too.
EC: Do you think Jeremy helped to influence that relationship?
SSG: Jeremy helped his father see the light, in a sense, out of all the brothers. I like that the youngest son was blunt, and he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid to just say, ‘Dad, you’re being ridiculous, or what are you thinking?’ Evan seemed almost too nice, so I kind of wanted to have Jeremy realize that Evan’s got some flaws, too.
EC: What about the role of the relationship between Jeremy, Evan’s son, and Becca, the English woman?
SSG: I liked Jeremy and his dad a lot together. Jeremy kind of cracked me up, and I thought, ‘Well, Jeremy isn’t sure what he wants to be.’ It was fun just having him interested in this girl. She had her own needs, and I thought they were just a good foil, because he really liked her. She liked him. She had a difficult family life. There was also, she was English. He isn’t sure what he wants to do. And so, there was a nice little conflict, I hadn’t planned on. I wanted Jeremy’s point of view, just so we had an observer. The reader had an observer.
EC: Next book?
SSG: I say this series is a little dipping into women’s fiction and maybe just thinking about some other things that women must deal with besides just falling in love and being in a romantic relationship. I like that some of these books has some things for a reader to think about besides just the main romance going on.
In the next book, The Forbidden Caller, the widow, is only 24. It comes out next month. She wasn’t too keen on joining the Widow’s Club, because she thought, ‘I don’t really want to be with a bunch of old ladies.’ The third book is called The Persistent Caller. There is a prologue; the next widow was in an awful marriage, and she’s been in the widow’s club a long time. Somebody comes along, and changes her mind, where it becomes a tough decision for her, and she questions, does she want to leave? I believe it comes out in March
I also have coming out in November, E is for Englisher. It’s a Christmas book, which is my favorite type to write, with baby doll sheep. So, very cute. They’re all named after states. The heroine happens to be a widow, having a hard time of trying to move on. She meets this guy and they kind of bond over the six sheep on Christmas Eve.
THANK YOU!!
***
BIO: Elise Cooper has written book reviews and interviewed best-selling authors since 2009. Her reviews have covered several different genres, including thrillers, mysteries, women’s fiction, romance and cozy mysteries. An avid reader, she engages authors to discuss their works, and to focus on the descriptions of their characters and the plot. While not writing reviews, Elise loves to watch baseball and visit the ocean in Southern California, with her dog and husband.
Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for BURIED ON THE ISLAND (DI Liam O’Reilly Mysteries Book #17) by Stewart Giles on this blog tour.
Below you will find a book blurb, my book review, the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
***
Book Blurb
Secrets never stay buried forever.
An exciting home renovation project becomes the stuff of nightmares when the remains of three people are unearthed while digging the hole for the swimming pool. The bones are old, and nobody seems to know who they belonged to.
Detective Inspector O’Reilly is brought in to investigate, and during a further excavation of the scene, another body is found. And this one was killed and buried recently.
As he digs deeper, he soon suspects that the bodies were meant to be found. They were buried there for a reason and when that reason becomes apparent it’s going send shockwaves around the island.
This is a case that’s going to cause O’Reilly to wonder if some things would be better off buried for good.
BURIED ON THE ISLAND (DI Liam O’Reilly Mystery Book #17) by Stewart Giles is a wonderfully twisted and gruesome addition to this crime mystery/police procedural thriller series. While each book is a complete standalone mystery, the characters continue to grow and evolve in their interactions, and I have enjoyed getting to know and care about them all in order of publication.
Detective Inspector Liam O’Reilly is called to the excavation for a pool, where they discover three skeletal bodies that appear to be decades old. When he decides to wait to see if this is even a crime scene, he is immediately called back when the fresh body of a young girl is also discovered with the same gruesome apparent cause of death.
As O’Reilly and his team investigate, another dead girl is discovered while the person in the process of burying her gets away. O’Reilly follows the clues that lead the team to a rich and powerful group on the island that are determined to keep their secrets buried.
I always enjoy the fascinating twists and surprises in this series and while the method of murders in this one is a little stomach-turning, it is still fascinating to follow where Mr. Giles leads. I rarely guess the identity of the murderer before O’Reilly’s reveal and this book was no different. In the personal lives of the story, I loved the future changes to come in O’Reilly’s family life and will be interested to see what changes are supposed to be happening in the Guernsey police department with two new heads of the department.
I highly recommend this addition to this crime mystery series and look forward to many more to come!
***
Author Bio
After reading English at 3 Universities and graduating from none of them, I set off travelling around the world with my wife, Ann, finally settling in South Africa, where we still live.
In 2014 Ann dropped a rather large speaker on my head and I came up with the idea for a detective series. DS Jason Smith was born. Smith, the first in the series was finished a few months later. 3 years and 8 DS Smith books later, Joffe Books wondered if I would be interested in working with them. As a self-published author, I agreed. However, we decided on a new series – the DC Harriet Taylor: Cornwall series. The Beekeeper was published and soon hit the number one spot in Australia. The second in the series, The Perfect Murder did just as well.
I continued to self-publish the Smith series and Unworthy hit the shelves in 2018 with amazing results. I therefore made the decision to self-publish The Backpacker which is book 3 in the Detective Harriet Taylor series which was published in July 2018. After The Backpacker I had an idea for a totally new start to a series – a collaboration between the Smith and Harriet thrillers and The Enigma was born. It brought together the broody, enigmatic Jason Smith and the more level-headed Harriet Taylor. The Miranda trilogy is something totally different. A psychological thriller trilogy. It is a real departure from anything else I’ve written before.
The Detective Jason Smith series continues to grow. I also have another series featuring an Irish detective who relocated to Guernsey, the Detective Liam O’Reilly series. There are also 3 stand alone novels.
