Linda Barnes Books

Every Friday a child's snapshot arrives at the Boston office of P.I. Carlotta Carlyle. There's no note. No return address. Just pictures of the child as a newborn, as a toddler, as a preschooler. Maybe Carlotta should have tossed them all in the trash. Maybe then she wouldn't have gotten mixed up again...in murder.Discovering what happened to the child in the photos draws Carlotta into a shattered picture of private lives sadly out of focus-and big shots mixed up with deadly conspiracy that stretches from a New England hospital to the Third World. And when she finds her own "little sister" from the Boston Big Sisters program in a different kind of danger, the truth jumps out in harsh black and white. In a world filled with killers and innocence, Carlotta Carlyle may be the only avenging angel left....

There's a mysterious woman who speaks broken English sitting in Carlotta's office with a newspaper clipping about a mutilated corpse. Suddenly Carlotta is plunged into the desperate world of illegal aliens, the cold-hearted immigration agents who hunt them down, and the deadly "coyotes" who bring the innocents across the border.

A case almost a quarter of a century cold turns red-hot again as Linda Barnes's detective and parttime cabbie, Carlotta Carlyle, searches for the source of a manuscript in the unmistakable voice of Thea Janis, the stunning literary sensation who disappeared twenty-four years ago at the height of her fame. Who wrote the new manuscript? Who is sending it piecemeal to Thea's family, demanding chapter-by-chapter blackmail? Who is playing games with Carlotta with every loaded word? Is Thea alive or dead? Is the author a victim, a plagiarist...or a killer? Carlotta Carlyle confronts demons from the past and from the present as she peels back layer upon layer of a glittering family's dark secrets in Cold Case, her most gripping investigation yet.

Carlotta Carlyle--part-time cab driver, full-time private eye--returns, taking on the night shift and a case that turns into a matter of life and death

Boston P.I. Carlotta Carlyle's allegedly unfaithful fiancé disappears right after his supposed mistress turns up dead.

Written by the author of four Michael Spraggue Mysteries and the short story "Lucky Penny", featuring Carlotta Carlyle, which won the Shamus Award for Best P.I. Short Story and the Anthony Award for Best Short Story, this is another story involving Carlotta Carlyle.

Carlotta thinks shes doing a friend a simple favor when she agrees to burglar-proof an elderly recluses apartment. But twenty-four hours later the woman turns up dead, her apartment ransacked, and Carlotta is left with entertainment moguls and real estate magnates breathing down her neck, as well as a lot of questions. Filled with gripping plot twists and razor-sharp dialogue, Flashpoint confirms Carlottas place as the hottest leading lady in detective fiction.

Carlotta's friend, Mooney, one of the few honest cops around in Boston, was buying a drink in a bar when he was attacked by a man with a knife. In self-defence he knocked him into a coma. His only hope is now to find the only witness he can remember. The author also wrote A Trouble of Fools.

"A fine job -- expertly written, with an ingenious wine caper set in the Napa Valley." The New York Times Book Review. A Michael Spraggue Mystery by the author of "Dead Heat." Michael Spraggue, a wealthy private eye turned movie actor, is in the middle of making a trashy Hollywood movie about -- what else? -- a private eye, when he gets a phone call from his sometime lover and current business partner in a California winery, Kate Holloway. Kate has troubling news. Not only has Lenny Brent, their volatile winemaker, vanished, but an unidentifiable corpse has appeared -- and Kate's the prime suspect! Spraggue hurries over in time to discover a second dead body -- that of Lenny. Can Spraggue solve this vintage mystery before he finds himself corked ?

"Barnes builds her plot like a fine pastry, layer by layer." Chicago Sun-Times A Michael Spraggue mystery. When the great chefs of New Orleans stage an elegant banquet, tempers burn hotter than cayenne pepper. Up-and-coming Cajun chef Joseph Fontenot is found with a slender French cooking knife through his heart, and all the evidence points to Dora Levoyer, sublime cook to Boston's wealthhy and eccentric Mary Spraggue Hillman. A guest at the banquet, Mary summons her nephew Michael Spraggue, actor-cum-private detective, to the scene. And soon Spraggue is investigating a murder case that will leave his mouth burning and his mind spinning. One thing is certain: the solution to the murder will make for a spicy mystery indeed!