Showing results by narrator "Michelle Babb" in All Categories

A biking and camping trip to southeastern Minnesota turns into double trouble for Frannie Shoemaker and her friends as she deals with a canoeing mishap and a couple of bodies. Strange happenings in the campground, the nearby nature learning center, and an old power plant complicate the suspect pool and Frannie tries to stay out of it - really - but what can she do? After all, she is only curious, but sometimes it isn't just cats who have trouble with that!

Frannie and Larry Shoemaker love taking their grandchildren, Sabet and Joe, camping with them. But at Bluffs State Park, Frannie finds herself worrying more than usual about their safety, and when another young girl disappears from the campground in broad daylight, her fears increase. The fun of a bike ride, a flea market, marshmallow guns, and a storyteller are quickly overshadowed. Accusations against Larry and her add to the cloud over their heads. Frannie begins to puzzle out the mystery.

Only two seasons matter in Coho Bay, Alaska - cruise ship and winter. Caribou King, owner of The Broken Antler Gallery, is hip-deep in tourists when her old college pal Taylor shows up asking for refuge, saying she has no place else to go. Cara is cautious; Taylor was the wife of one of Alaska's most renowned artists, Jonathan Snow, who was mauled to death by a bear the previous year. Why would his widow want to return to the location of her tragic loss? Something about Taylor's story just doesn't ring true.

For Gary Hawken, life in a coma comes with few perks. Nurses care for him and people sit by his bed and tell him stories, but the glorious mess of life passes him by. In a world where survival depends on his ability to understand his stories, Gary must recognize the value of his own soul. A hypnotic tale of one man's struggle to find the truth in his own epic life.

Abby Thomas is spending the summer in a run-down old house with a bratty pre-teen named Merrideth she is supposed to tutor. Not a dream job. But it does come with perks. There's John Roberts, a devastatingly attractive neighbor who is almost too wonderful to be real. And there's the new computer program Beautiful Houses - also too amazing to be real. No one knows how it works, but with it she can rewind and fast-forward the lives of all the people who ever lived in the house, including Charlotte Miles.

From the best-selling author of Lottery comes a new novel about greed, survival, and what's really important in life. At the bottom of the heap, there's nowhere to go but up. Waitress Tammy Tyree knows this intimately. Her life is a continual struggle of managing an eccentric uncle, looking after a younger brother who's not quite right, and doing everything she can to keep her family together in the small town of Spring, Washington.

A trip down memory lane is fine if you don't stumble on a body. Frannie Shoemaker and her friends camp at Old Dam Trail State Park near one of Donna Nowak's childhood homes. They take in the county....

Kathryn Broussard has managed her life with dignity and an I-know-you-have-feelings-but-I'm-coming-through-anyway attitude. She exudes confidence and control over the land much as a reigning queen rules her court. Her main focus - Grace, her daughter. Although grown, Grace depends on her mother's razor-sharp decision-making ability for everything. All is well in the land of dysfunctional mother-daughterhood until the unthinkable happens. Kathryn dies.

Geocaching isn't supposed to be about finding dead bodies. But when retiree Frannie Shoemaker goes camping, standard definitions don't apply. A weekend in a beautiful state park in Iowa buzzes with fund-raising events, a search for ninja turtles, a bevy of suspects, and lots of great food. But are the campers in the wrong place at the wrong time once too often?

When shadow-monsters attack in the cafeteria, eighth grader Penny Preston panics, starts a food fight, and unknowingly creates a trans-dimensional rift. Summoned to the counselor’s office, she expects suspension, but instead discovers that she exists in more than three dimensions. Unless she immediately begins training to learn to handle her powerful abilities, she risks losing her sanity. Together with Simon, her telepathic multidimensional cat, Penny struggles to save her relationship with her best friend, protect her universe, and uncover her connection to Arthurian myth.

Alaskan fine arts dealer Caribou King has closed up shop for the season and is looking forward to a peaceful winter, capped off by the birth of her sister's first child. When she discovers the body of Angela Nash, an elderly woman, in the old Tilamu house, Cara can't help poking her nose into the investigation. When Alex Tilamu shows up at Mrs. Nash's funeral, drunk and ranting about murder, Cara is convinced there is more at stake than a dilapidated house on the edge of the bay.

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby's twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea, while mother Tabby, who also struggles with addiction, lies inebriated on the living room floor.

Eight-grader Penny Preston thought she knew how to handle the Bodach, the spirits from the fifth dimension. But suddenly something is attacking the structure of the multiverse. Left unchecked, the attack will tear the fabric separating the dimensions and destroy the universe in a cataclysmic cosmic crunch. As the stress on the fabric grows, higher-dimensional energy escapes into Piper Falls, NY, reenergizing the Bodach. Emboldened, they use their regained powers to wreak havoc on the small town. The extra energy draws several new higher-dimensional entities to Piper Falls.

A cozy/thriller mystery! The starry skies over New Mexico, the "Land of Enchantment", may hold secrets of their own. The Shoemakers and the Ferraros, on an extended camping trip, find themselves picking up a souvenir they don't want and taking sidetrips they didn't plan on.

Murder, mystery meat, and morning sickness! Hudson and Lovita are expecting, and she's having trouble keeping food down for the first time in her life. Her best friend, Sue Jan, is busy juggling mommyhood. The Crown of Glory Beauty Salon and Boutique is busier than a one-toothed man in a corn-on-the-cob-eating contest. Things are great until a handsome law intern disappears after an argument with their top stylist's once-upon-a-time wayward son.

During the pandemic, camping was supposed to be a fairly safe activity. That's only if you don't camp with Frannie Shoemaker. Frannie and her husband Larry commit in the fall of 2019 to take on a campground hosting job in the spring of 2020. In that time, the world turned upside down, and their job came with a whole new set of challenges. But of course, where Frannie's involved, other trouble can't be far behind.

The Will Travel for Trouble series: short cozy mysteries featuring Minnie Crockwell, recreational vehicle (RV) enthusiast, and her ghost traveling companion, Peregrine Ebenezer (Ben) Alford, as they travel across the United States, discovering murder and mayhem along the way.

Settling into her new condominium on Mirror Pond, novelist Sallie Chilcoat feels lost in Ashburn, Virginia, after moving to the state for love of a man. But with the end of that relationship, she finds herself at loose ends. She stares out the window at the pond and contemplates learning to kayak...or taking up painting...or climbing Mount Everest. Movement in the overwater gazebo catches her eye, and she grabs up her people-watching binoculars to see a man sitting inside the gazebo playing an accordion.

A holiday novella. The Shoemakers and Ferraros plan to spend Christmas in Texas with Larry and Jane Ann's brother and then take a camping trip through the Southwest. But those plans are stopped cold when they hit a rogue ice storm in Missouri and they end up snowbound in a campground. And that's just the beginning.

Frannie Shoemaker and her friends go camping to get away from the real world. So, they are surprised and dismayed to find their wilderness campground the production site of a new "reality" show - Celebrity Campout. Reality intrudes on their week in the form of accidents, nature, and even murder. They handle the situation with their usual humor, compassion, and mystery solving, because...camping can be murder.