Squeaky clean Singapore does a poor job hiding its sins, and sinners. Like the pursuit of the Maltese Falcon, everyone wants a piece of the stolen gold from China's past. Barbie, a continent-hopping English teacher with shadowy talents, becomes enmeshed in the chase. It starts with her friend's missing boyfriend, whose murky past and dubious acquaintances confound the search. As well as catching up with her friend, Barbie reunites with her son Jon, whom she hasn't seen in eight years. Together they relive and explore their troubled relationship, exposing family puzzles and betraying decades-old secrets. The pursuit of clues by the three detectives leads to more than the quest for the missing boyfriend, as the alleyways of Singapore cough up improbably shady players in the game. Is everyone someone else? Who can our heroes trust? And, is the gold real, or only an ephemeral stand-in for a forbidden treasure?Singapore Fling is the fourth in the series of Teacher Abroad mysteries.

Singapore Fling: Teachers Abroad Mystery #4

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Wachob, Phyllis

Mystery

Phyllis Wachob

It wasn't unusual to find a dead body in the orchards surrounding Bakersfield, California. So when Vermilion Blew reads in the local paper about yet one more corpse dug up by a backhoe, she dismisses the discovery. That is, until the revelation that the man had a ticket in his pocket for a movie that she had attended with her fiancé, thirty-seven years before. And that movie was the last time she had seen Frankie Monroe, the evening before her nuptials. Very has gone on with her life, or so she believes, until a slippery slope of events pushes her into a painful and mostly repressed past. A return to the emotional roller-coaster of the days and weeks that followed the spoiled wedding causes Very to face a horde of questions that she had longed to bury. Why was Frankie so secretive about his origins? Does the clue of the movie ticket solve anything or open a swarm of meddlesome queries? When new evidence emerges about the body in the orchard, Very plunges into the murky world of identifying and tracing missing persons, and she discovers a new profession, skip-tracing private investigator.

Body in the Orchard: Kern Kapers Mystery #1 (Kern Kapers Mysteries)

"Killer Kern Strikes Again" read the headlines in the Bakersfield morning paper. Vermilion Blew, in sorrow and disbelief, reads of the late spring icy waters that have claimed three new victims. And exposed a decades old body in the riverbank. Could this be her long missing fiancé, Frankie Monroe, who had left the day before the wedding, 38 years ago? Before Very can ask any questions, she is plunged into an investigation foisted on her by her PI partner. One of the victims is deemed a suicide, but the family refuses to believe this conclusion. Then, Very finds herself deep in neighborhoods she'd rather avoid, questioning the family of the other two victims. Is something askew with the story of the teenage girl and her older male cousin who tried to rescue her? Did they see the suicidal woman at Hart Park moments before she killed herself? Can Very extricate herself from these layers of lies and survive to tell the truth? 
This is the second of the Kern Kapers Mysteries, featuring Vermilion Blew, a retired school librarian and English teacher. In the first mystery, Body in the Orchard, Very faces the possibility that instead of being abandoned at the altar, her fiance was murdered. In this second mystery, she again must grapple with the possibility that Frankie Monroe is no longer among the living. She has also been sucked into helping a local private investigator and now is asked to help with a new case.

Killer Kern

Hot Tub Homicide is a light-hearted cozy mystery. Vermilion blew has moved on from her mother's house, so she thinks, and has acquired a new house, and a cat she names Cleopatra. She also has a new set of friends at Five Points, one of Bakersfield's newest retirement communities. But when Very's new acquaintances keep moving on to the marble forest, she begins to doubt that her move was a wise one. Then she discovers a body floating in the hot tub. Was this just another older man on his last legs, or was it homicide? Very holds tight to her new set of friends, but reaches out to her Private Investigator partner and her oldest friend, who husband is a deputy sheriff, to solve the latest mystery. She also gets a lead on her her long-ago fiance, who may have fled and subsequently changed his name. This is the third in a series of mysteries set in Kern County.

Hot Tub Homicide

Cuyama Cold Case