Mary Jane Maffini Books In Order

Speak Ill of the Dead

Camilla MacPhee is the black sheep of her perfect, blonde family, although she runs a law office specializing in Justice for Victims of violent crimes. However, her uneasy association with the world of crime takes a bizarre turn when a vicious, vindictive fashion columnist with underworld connections named Mitzi Brochu is crucified in a downtown hotel room. The problem is that Camilla’s best friend Robin was on her way to meet the victim, and has become the main suspect. Camilla sets out to vindicate her friend, but finding the real killer isn’t easy, as just about anyone among the politicians and supermodels skewered by Mitzi’s rapier wit could be said to have had ample motive. The investigation turns dangerous, as Camilla receives cryptic warnings while following a grisly killer’s trail marked by more murders of humans and felines. The cast of characters includes a sleazy rock promoter, a nosy, sherry mad old lady, a suave but mysterious hotel manager, a grumpy Mountie, and several manipulative sisters in this seriously funny first mystery novel by Mary Jane Maffini.

The Icing On the Corpse

In the second Camilla MacPhee mystery, it’s now forty below in Canada’s capital, but victims’ advocate Camilla is feeling the heat. When a savage serial batterer goes on the rampage looking for revenge against his former girlfriend, the terrified woman turns to Camilla and Justice for Victims for help. But a sudden change of fortune causes her client to really feel the chill. Camilla wades into the investigation, now one of murder, and gets a frosty reception from the police. Soon everyone connected with the case is either cooling their heels behind bars or trying to avoid cold storage in the morgue. Camilla’s really skating on thin ice looking for this killer literally.

Little Boy Blues

In the third Camilla MacPhee Mystery, Camilla’s looking forward to cutting loose at Ottawa’s Bluesfest, the huge open air extravaganza, and to seeing the tail end of her annoying office assistant, Alvin, who is finally quitting. Then the news comes from the East Coast. Alvin’s younger brother Jimmy has vanished from the midst of a Canada Day crowd in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Is he dead? Has he been abducted? Sleuthing irritably about Sydney on Alvin’s behalf, Camilla manages to make the usual quota of people froth at the mouth, including Jimmy’s frantic family, forlorn friends and puzzled teachers. She doesn’t spare the parish priest or even the guy at the chip stand. Before Camilla knows it, all roads lead back to Ottawa, where a killer with everything to lose waits to create havoc among the tents, guitar pickers and happy, swaying crowds. If Camilla doesn’t sort out this whole mess, how many other people are going to die?

The Devil’s in the Details

It’s Labour Day, Camilla’s favourite weekend of the year. She’s planning to relax and ponder what’s happening in her relationship with policman Sgt. Ray Deveau. She’s emphatically not planning to get involved in anything that means trouble. No wonder the news that an old acquaintance has had an accident comes as a surprise. There must be some mistake. By the time Camilla unearths Laura’s connection to a violent revolutionary group active two decades earlier, she’s had several blows to the head and discovered that people she’s been talking to keep ending up dead. Someone will do anything to keep Laura’s connections secret. Getting arrested is the least of Camilla’s problems.

The Dead Don’t Get Out Much

Remembrance Day is a proud day for Camilla’s good friend Mrs. Violet Parnell, one of five thousand Canadian women who went overseas during World War II. But the day after Remembrane Day, Mrs. Parnell has vanished. Camilla, with only a few letters and documents to guide her, follows her friend to Tuscany, chasing through historic towns, across high promontories, and along steep mountain roads. Vanishing partisans and Allied aircraft crash sites keep Camilla hopping as she tries to find Mrs. P before someone with a deadly serious reason to keep the past hidden finds her first.

Law and Disorder

Victims’ advocate Camilla MacPhee is following the trial of Lloyd Brugel, a ruthless criminal kingpin charged with a fatal firebombing, and she’s looking forward to seeing him convicted. But, when his sleazy counsel is found dead, this conveniently delays the proceedings. The lawyer, no saint himself, was both drowned and shot. Someone wasn’t taking any chances. There’s also the dead judge and then the real estate lawyer who perished in an unlikely accident. How many others are there? None of it makes any sense to Camilla, whose life was already complicated enough, thank you very much. Camilla does her stubborn best to head off the killer, hampered by her assistant, the police, her bossy sisters, and the arrival of her possible stepdaughters to be. She comforts herself with the thought that, at least the future stepdaughters are safe.

Lament for a Lounge Lizard

As if it weren’t bad enough being a failed romance writer with no sex life, poor Fiona Silk has to cope with the spectacularly embarrassing demise of her old lover, the poet Benedict Kelly in her bed. It’s exactly the sort of thing people notice in St. Aubaine, Quebec, a picturesque bilingual tourist town of two thousand. Now the police start getting nasty, the media vans stay parked on her lawn and the neighbors’ tongues keep wagging in both official languages. Can Fiona outwit a murderer in the mood for some serious mischief?

Too Hot to Handle

Poor Fiona Silk is broke again. Her romance writing career is tanking, her ex husband’s stalling with her divorce settlement and her tiny house may be sold for unpaid taxes. But Fiona’s new agent, Lola, has a plan. Fiona can write an erotic cookbook. It’s good timing since the TV event, Hot Stuff! En Feu! is being shot in her small town. Producers, staff, and media are about to descend on the village, including two popular and sensuous chefs. This project would be easier if Fiona had a sex life or a working oven. Fiona’s still pretty shaky from witnessing the mysterious crash of a Cadillac Escalade and the death of the driver who had treated her to an episode of road rage. Still she wants to cobble the erotic cookbook. If only Fiona could keep her mind off that fatal crash. Soon bad things start to happen to people, but, oddly, only when Fiona is nearby. Before long there’s danger at the Hot Stuff En Feu! location, Fiona’s tiny home is in flames, and the body count is rising. Will Canada’s most reluctant sleuth stop a killer before her own goose is cooked? Recipes are included.

Organize Your Corpses

Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer. Nothing is out of place in her closets but her life’s a mess. So she’s dumped her cheating ex fianc , moved back home to Woodbridge, New York, and started making up to do lists some of which include solving the occasional murder. Charlotte’s new job has her digging through years of accumulated junk to find some important documents. Instead she finds her client, the meanest teacher in town, dead under a pile of the debris that plagued her. And there’s no end to the list of suspects starting with Charlotte herself.

The Cluttered Corpse

Organization can get very messy…

When Charlotte Adams agrees to help Emmy Lou Rheinbeck organize her stuffed animal collection, she never imagines she’ll find herself fending off pranksters whose shenanigans lead to murder.

Death Loves a Messy Desk

Nothing makes Charlotte Adams happier than freeing people from clutter and she boasts a waiting list of sloppy clients. Her free time has been taken up solving fatally untidy cases. Her latest task: a woman has hired her to organize a coworker’s hopelessly cluttered desk. But when the miss behind the mess goes missing, workplace tempers rise. Now, Charlotte must open a brand new folder one she hopes won’t be filed under M for murder.

Closet Confidential

Fourth in the series featuring organizer and amateur sleuth Charlotte Adams, following Death Loves a Messy Desk. A friend hires Charlotte to organize her closets and prove that her daughter’s accident was murder. And now Charlotte has to get a house and her suspects in order.

The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder

Mona Pringle, the local 911 operator, is calling Charlotte Adams with her own emergency: Serena Redding, a high school ‘mean girl’ who used to torment Mona, is coming back for a reunion. When Mona talks about how good it would feel to kill Serena, Charlotte doesn’t believe she means it. But when a woman who looks like Serena is killed in a hit and run, and another former mean girl is also run down, Charlotte realizes she needs to look both ways for the now missing Mona.