January 2025 – Ruff Drafts

A Perilous Premiere (Stone & Steele Mysteries)
by Gail Meath

About A Perilous Premiere

A Perilous Premiere (Stone & Steele Mysteries)
Historical Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Setting – California
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cranberry Pond Publishing (November 15, 2024)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 182 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8227660671
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CZS3J93M

Solving their own murders is the least of their problems…and the beginning of Stone & Steele, a reluctant yet surprisingly skilled investigative team.

The Golden Age of Hollywood, 1938. Vivian Steele moved to California to start a new life. She opened a fashion boutique in Beverly Hills, befriended Carole Lombard, the actress, and married a successful banker. But when her husband is murdered, Vivian discovers she isn’t the only one hiding a few secrets.

An anonymous phone call lures Vivian to a plush hotel room where she stumbles upon the dead body of a beautiful young actress – her husband’s mistress. To add fuel to the fire, she’s not alone.

Preston Stone, her adversary and Hollywood’s notorious playboy, is standing beside her. Suspiciously, they part ways only to find themselves alone again at a movie premiere two days later, and the message becomes brutally clear. They’re both the next targets of a cold-blooded killer.

Together, Vivian and Preston are thrown into a deadly race to find a missing collection of valuable coins and stop a vicious killer before they become the next murder victims. But first, they need to stop pointing their fingers at each other.

A Perilous Premiere is the first book in this exciting new 1930s Stone & Steele mystery series starring a great cast of characters ranging from the rich and famous to Bella, a Boston Terrier, her new friend, Boris, a Saint Bernard, and a few other endearing folks. (A pretty clean read)

About Gail Meath

Gail Meath is the author of the multi-award-winning Jax Diamond Mysteries, the fun series about of a wise-cracking PI, his sweet German Shepherd partner, Ace, and his Broadway singing heartthrob, Laura, as they solve crazy crimes during the Roaring Twenties. She’s currently working on the first book in her exciting new 1930s mystery series, Stone & Steele Mysteries, takes place during the glamorous Golden Age of Hollywood. As always, she blends the most loveable characters with a good, solid mystery.

Gail also has a growing list of other award-winning historical romances, mysteries, westerns, and fictional biographies of true heroines. She lives in a small village in Upstate New York with her husband and their sweet, little Boston Terrier, and she spends loads of time with her grandchildren.

Excerpt

Preston made his way back inside to his study on the second floor. He closed the door behind him and stood over his desk, staring at the papers and photographs spread across the top of it.

He couldn’t be sure that Vivian’s actions were unrelated to the Willoughby assignment, but it seemed unlikely. She was more focused on her husband’s death, which is why she went to Bunker Hill to watch the police capture his killer. And yesterday, she only went to the hotel after she received the phone call from Miss Trimble requesting to meet with her.

When he and Vivian entered the hotel room, he was surprised as hell to see Tilly lying dead on the floor, but Vivian was even more surprised to see the photograph on the coffee table. The minute she swiped it, he had a pretty good idea about what was going on.

He was also convinced that Vivian had absolutely nothing to do with Tilly’s murder. Otherwise, she would have taken the other two pictures that were in plain sight and searched the rest of the apartment to remove all the evidence, like the shoebox full of love notes and photos of Tilly and Vivian’s husband that he found underneath the bed.

Preston shuffled through the photographs he’d dumped onto his desk, some of which even made him blush. He picked up the one with Tilly and George Ramsey posing together on the Venice Beach Boardwalk and studied it. Then, he re-read the last note, or rather love letter, George had written to Tilly, which was dated the day he died.

Apparently, George and Tilly were planning to run away together that weekend.

Preston knew if the police had found the shoebox, they would immediately put Vivian at the top of their list of suspects in Tilly’s murder. She might also be accused of hiring Elliott Kimball to kill her husband if someone on the police force had seen her at Bunker Hill watching the whole thing go down.

So, after he shooed her out of the hotel room, he packed up the other photographs, the shoebox, and the illegal wiretap that he had Freddie connect to Tilly’s phone for an entirely different purpose and took everything with him. Then, just before he left the room, he discovered the bullet shell casing on the floor and deduced Tilly was shot with a thirty-eight-caliber Beretta handgun.

Now, along with everything else, he was curious to know why Tilly had a sudden urge to meet with her former lover’s wife minutes before someone killed her.

The telephone on his desk rang, and Preston quickly picked it up. “Hello? What have you got, Barney? Nothing! Did you check the East Coast? Her sister, Patricia, moved there sometime last year. Are you sure you spelled their name correctly? There’s an ‘e’ at the end of Steele.” Preston got up from his chair and started pacing back and forth behind his desk while listening to Barney squawk. “Okay, okay, I understand. I didn’t mean to yell at you. Just keep looking and call me as soon as you find something.”

He hung up and sat back down in his chair. Well, that just complicated things. It seems Vivian and her sister didn’t exist before they arrived in Los Angeles six years ago.

Author Links

Website: https://www.gailmeath.com

Facebook: https://facebook.com/gailmeathauthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gailmeathauthor

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220631482-a-perilous-premiere

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/books/a-perilous-premiere-by-gail-meath

Purchase Links – Amazon – B&N – Kobo – Bookshop.org –

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