Deadly Housewives (v5) (epub) Read online

  They all grinned. And then, that Sunday when they saw her at mass, they ribbed her unmercifully. But they did it with respect. Everybody had heard how my mother fought like a tiger for her children. Nobody had ever told them she also fought like a Cossack.

  Deadly. That’s what she was.

  And sometimes, when you’re a very small child who finds herself at the mercy of capricious adults, having a deadly mother can come in handy.

  Still, even with the bits I didn’t see, it’s a good story.

  Biographies

  Nevada Barr was born an hour east of Reno, Nevada, and raised on a small mountain airport in the Sierras. Being a sufferer of the Seven Year Itch, she has changed careers many times from waitress to actress to ranger to writer. The marriage of the last two, ranger and writer, spawned her award-winning mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon. The most recent in the series is Hard Truth, set in Rocky Mountains National Park. Nevada now lives in New Orleans and is working on a stand-alone thriller that will be published in 2007. That done, she plans a glorious reunion with Anna in a park yet to be selected.

  Barbara Collins is one of the most respected short-story writers in the mystery field, with appearances in over a dozen top anthologies, including Murder Most Delicious, Women on the Edge, and the bestselling Cat Crimes series. She was the coeditor (and a contributor) to the bestselling anthology Lethal Ladies, and her stories were selected for inclusion in the first three volumes of The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories.

  Two acclaimed hardcover collections of her work have been published—Too Many Tomcats and (with her husband) Murder—His and Hers. Their first novel together, the Baby Boomer thriller Regeneration, was a bestseller and has been purchased by Hollywood; their second collaborative novel, Bombshell, was published to excellent reviews. They are now writing a new series for Kensington as “Barbara Allan,” the first book titled Antiques Roadkill due out in 2006.

  Barbara has been the production manager and/or line producer on Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, and other in dependent film projects emanating from the production company she and her husband jointly run. The Collinses’ collaboration extends to a son, Nathan, a recent University of Iowa grad.

  Once a daily-newspaper reporter in St. Paul, Minnesota, Carole Nelson Douglas moved to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1984 to write fiction full-time. Her fifty novels include mainstream women’s fiction as well as science fiction and fantasy. Her Irene Adler Sherlock Holmesian suspense series began with a New York Times Notable Book of the Year citation for Good Night, Mr. Holmes. Spider Dance is the latest title. Midnight Louie, Las Vegas’s cozy-noir feline PI, celebrates his eighteenth case in Cat in a Quicksilver Caper. Cat in a Midnight Choir received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, the first animal mystery so honored. Douglas’s fiction and nonfiction work has won or been short-listed for more than fifty writing awards and she’s had stories in eight Year’s Best mystery anthologies. She and her husband are owned by several adopted cats and a dog. She has never been a house wife. (Web site: www.catolenelsondouglas.com.)

  Award-winning, bestselling author Eileen Dreyer, known as Kathleen Korbel to her Silhouette readers, has published twenty-two books for Silhouette since 1986 and, under her own name, eight suspense novels and seven short stories, including her most recent novel from St. Martin’s Press, Sinners and Saints, in which St. Louis forensic nurse liaison Chastity Byrnes has to search New Orleans for her missing sister.

  The proud holder of an Anthony Award nomination, Eileen is a rabid researcher, supplementing her twenty years’ experience in the field of medicine—sixteen in trauma nursing—with training in forensic nursing and death investigation, and has graduated from the Tactical EMS School, which qualifies her to act as a medic on a SWAT team.

  When not addictively traveling, she still lives in her native St. Louis with her husband and two children (and remains close to her extended family, of which she is now matriarch and current vanquisher of infidels). She has animals but refuses to subject them to the glare of the limelight.

  Vicki Hendricks is the author of noir novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, and Sky Blues. Her short stories appear in collections and periodicals, including Murder for Revenge, Best American Erotics 2000, Flesh and Blood, Tart Noir, Nerve.com, and Mississippi Review Online. She lives in Hollywood, Florida, and teaches writing at Broward Community College. Her work reflects interests in adventure and sports, such as skydiving and scuba, and knowledge of south Florida environment. Her latest novel of murder and obsession, Cruel Poetry (2006), is set in South Beach, Miami.

  For starters Suzann Ledbetter insists her mother-in-law is the world’s best and a heck of a good sport.

  Suzann’s mother taught her tomboy daughter to read at the age of five, assuming the kid couldn’t have her nose in a book and get in trouble simultaneously. It didn’t work, but Suzann’s insatiable curiosity, smarty-pants mouth, tendency to make up stuff, and love of mystery novels somehow became the basis of a writing career.

  Suzann (www.suzannledbetter.com) is a popular speaker and an editor-at-large for Family Circle. Her latest books are the contemporary suspense caper, Once a Thief (Mira), and Shady Ladies (Tor/Forge), a collection of biographies of seventeen fascinating, but little-known, nineteenth-century females (both published in 2006).

  Suzann and her husband, David Ellingsworth, live in the southwest Missouri Ozarks with three retired racing greyhounds, two cats, and about nine million books.

  Elizabeth Massie is a two-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of horror novels, novellas, and short stories, published by major houses including Simon & Schuster, Tor, Harper, Avon, NAL, and more. Her books include Sineater, Welcome Back to the Night, Wire Mesh Mothers, Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (co-authored with Stephen Mark Rainey), Shadow Dreams, The Fear Report, The Little Magenta Book of Mean Stories, and others. Her most recent novel, Twisted Branch: A Novel of the Abbadon Inn (written as “Chris Blaine”), was published by Berkley in 2005. Elizabeth also writes historical novels for young adults. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with illustrator Cortney Skinner (designer/builder of the mutant and other props for the Sony-released feature film, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra), and is mother to Erin, twenty-nine, Brian, twenty-six, and grandmother to Anya, not quite a year.

  During her twenty-five years as a professional writer Christine Matthews has produced more than sixty short stories in the mystery, horror, dark fantasy, and western genres. Her Gil & Claire mystery trilogy began in 1999 and concluded with Same Time, Same Murder in 2005. Of the second novel, The Masks of Auntie Laveau, the L.A. Times said, “This is a blueprint for how to write a thriller.” Her stories have appeared in three collections of Year’s Finest Stories and her story “I’m a Dirty Girl” was optioned for a film. She has also published a collection of her short stories, Gentle Insanities and Other States of Mind. She was coeditor of Lethal Ladies II and a contributor to the book Writing the P.I. Novel. In addition she is a poet and a playwright. She is currently assembling a “reading theater” production of her work.

  Denise Mina left school at sixteen and worked at a series of jobs before going to school to study law. After law school, she misused a Ph.D. grant to research and write Garnethill, in which a former psychiatric patient wakes up to find her married lover sitting in her living room with his throat slit. The book won the CWA John Creasy Memorial Dagger for the best first novel in 1998. Exile and Resolution, parts two and three of the Maureen O’Donnell trilogy, followed. Her first stand-alone book, Deception, is the discovered diary of a house husband whose wife has been convicted of murder. Field of Blood (2005) is the first of five books following Paddy Meehan through Britain in the eighties and nineties. She is now writing the follow-up Dead Hour, thirteen issues of Hellblazer for DC Comics, plus a short play “Lady-Mag.” She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

  Marcia Muller has long been considered a pioneer in the mystery world because of her crea
tion of Sharon McCone, a San Francisco private investigator. The first McCone novel was published in 1977. The Chicago Tribune called her “one of the treasures of the genre.” And the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, “Reading Muller is like watching a superb ballplayer at work.” In July 2001, Muller published Point Deception, a departure from her longtime series set in the fictional Soledad County. Her latest novel, Cape Perdido, is also set in Soledad County and was published by Mysterious Press in 2005. She has received the Grandmaster Award from MWA, the PWA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ridley Award, an American Mystery Award, and the Anthony Award. Muller has also written three novels with her husband, Bill Pronzini, and published four short-story collections and numerous nonfiction articles. She is currently at work on her twenty-fourth Sharon McCone novel.

  Sara Paretsky was recently awarded the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement Award, the Eye, for her prodigious contribution to the PI genre. She has also been awarded the Diamond Dagger Award for Best Novel from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain, but amazingly, the Eye is the first American award she has ever received. Her Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski appeared on the scene in 1983 with Indemnity Only. Fire Sale, the twelfth Warshawski novel, was published in 2005. There is also a collection of Sara’s short work, Windy City Blues.

  Nancy Pickard is the author of the Jenny Cain and Marie Lightfoot mystery series. She is also the author of dozens of short stories and of three novels in the Eugenia Potter series created by Virginia Rich. She is the coauthor, with Lynn Lott, of the acclaimed nonfiction book about writing Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path. She has won Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards for her short stories and Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for her novels. She is a three-time Edgar Award nominee. Her most recent novel is The Virgin of Small Plans, which is set in the Flint Hills of her home state of Kansas.

  S. J. Rozan is the author of eight novels in the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony award–winning Lydia Chin/Bill Smith PI series, including Winter and Night, which won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity awards and was nominated for the Shamus and Anthony awards. Her most recent book is a post-9/11 novel, Absent Friends, published to rave reviews in 2004. Born and raised in the Bronx, she is an architect and lives in Greenwich Village.

  Julie Smith is a former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the San Francisco Chronicle who lives in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans. Her first novel featuring New Orleans cop Skip Langdon, New Orleans Mourning, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel, and she has since published eight more highly acclaimed books in the series, including Jazz Funeral, 82 Desire, and Mean Woman Blues. Her most recent novel, PI on a Hot Tin Roof, is her fourth featuring African-American New Orleans private eye Talba Wallis, aka the Baroness Pontalba.

  Critics have hailed Smith for having “a knack for reinventing herself with each new series while established characters are still going strong” and “her deft exploration of her characters’ intimate relationships.” For more information about Julie Smith, visit her Web site at www.casamysterioso.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Cover design and illustration by Larry Rostant.

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright Notices

  “Dear Christine” and “The House of Deliverance” copyright © 2006 by Christine Matthews.

  “The One That Got Away” copyright © 2006 by Julie Smith.

  “GDMFSOB” copyright © 2006 by Nevada Barr.

  “Lawn and Order” copyright © 2006 by Carole Nelson Douglas.

  “Joy Ride” copyright © 2006 by Nancy Pickard.

  “The Next-Door Collector” copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Massie.

  “Acid Test” copyright © 2006 by Sara Paretsky.

  “Trailer Trashed” copyright © 2006 by Barbara Collins.

  “An Invisible Minus Sign” copyright © 2006 by Denise Mina.

  “Purzz, Baby” copyright © 2006 by Vicki Hendricks.

  “The Next Nice Day” copyright © 2006 by S. J. Rozan

  “He Said…She Said” copyright © 2006 by Marcia Muller.

  “How to Murder Your Mother-in-Law” copyright © 2006 by Suzann Ledbetter.

  “Vanquishing the Infidel” copyright © 2006 by Eileen Dreyer.

  DEADLY HOUSEWIVES. Copyright © 2006 by Christine Matthews. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books™.

  ePub edition March 2006 ISBN 9780061743078

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Deadly housewives / edited by Christine Matthews.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-085327-3 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-06-085327-1 (pbk.)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900

  Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1

  Auckland, New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Contents

  Introduction: Dear Christine

  The One That Got Away: Julie Smith

  GDMFSOB: Nevada Barr

  The House of Deliverance: Christine Matthews

  Lawn and Order: Carole Nelson Douglas

  Joy Ride: Nancy Pickard

  The Next-Door Collector: Elizabeth Massie

  Acid Test: Sara Paretsky

  Trailer Trashed: Barbara Collins

  An Invisible Minus Sign: Denise Mina

  Purrz, Baby: Vicki Hendricks

  The Next Nice Day: S. J. Rozan

  He Said…She Said: Marcia Muller

  How to Murder Your Mother-in-Law: Suzann Ledbetter

  Vanquishing the Infidel: Eileen Dreyer

  Biographies

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher