Books

Careful What You Wish For

After a video of her organizing her sock drawer goes viral, Emily Harlow uses her moment in the spotlight to start Freeze-Frame Clutter Kickers and launch her career as a professional organizer. The catch: she’s married to a man who can’t drive past a yard sale without stopping.

Like other professionals who make a living decluttering people’s lives, Emily has devised a set of ironclad rules. When working with couples, for example, she makes it clear that each person is only allowed to declutter his or her own stuff. This stipulation has kept Emily’s own marriage together these past few years as her basement, attic, and garage have filled up with her husband’s finds. She’d love nothing more than to toss out all his crap. He says he’s a collector. Emily knows better—he’s a hoarder. And the larger his “collection” becomes, the deeper the distance grows between Emily and the man she married.

Luckily, Emily’s got two new clients to distract herself: an elderly widow whose husband left behind a storage unit that she didn’t know existed, and a young wife whose husband won’t allow her stuff into their house. But when Emily’s initial meeting with the young wife takes a detour involving too much wine and fantasies of how much more pleasant life would be without their collecting spouses, Emily finds herself in a mess that might be too big for her
to clean up.

You’ll Never Know, Dear

Lissie Woodham was only seven years old when her little sister Janey disappeared. They had been in the front yard, playing with their dolls, custom creations made for them by their mother Miss Sorrel, a famous dollmaker. Lissie wandered off for a moment. When she returned to the yard, Janey was gone, and so was her doll.

Lis has never stopped blaming herself for what happened, and it continues to haunt her. Every year on the anniversary of Janey’s disappearance, Miss Sorrel places a classified ad in the local papers with a picture of Janey’s one-of-a-kind doll, offering a cash reward for its return. Never, in all these years, has anyone brought her a doll that could be Janey’s—until now.

Four decades after Janey went missing, the doll comes back…

Night Night, Sleep Tight

With NIGHT NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT, Hallie Ephron delivers her most captivating mystery yet, tinged with Hollywood glamour and set in a town where fame and infamy are often interchangeable.

Los Angeles 1985: Deirdre Unger makes the drive from San Diego to Beverly Hills to help her screenwriter father put his dilapidated house on the market. She is expecting to deal with his usual kvetching and dark moods, but she gets a lot more than she expected…

NIGHT NIGHT draws on Ephron’s experiences growing up in Beverly Hills, the third of four daughters of screenwriting duo Henry and Phoebe Ephron. Much of the novel and its main character, Deirdre Unger, spring Ephron’s own experience growing up in Beverly Hills in the shadow of so much money and celebrity. And part of the novel is a murder mystery, one that is entirely fictional but inspired by an infamous scandal, a murder that occurred just a few blocks from where Ephron grew up. These threads are woven together in a tale of love and betrayal, of celebrity and its consequences, set in the glamorous world of Beverly Hills.

There Was an Old Woman

Once upon a time…

… there was an old woman who lived in the Bronx neighborhood known as Higgs Point.

There, tiny shotgun houses are perched on waterfront. The view from Mina Yetner’s window is of marsh grass, birds, and in the distance the Manhattan sky line.

Mina doesn’t like to get into her neighbor’s business, but when Sandra Ferrante, a troubled woman with a drinking problem, is pulled from her home and taken by ambulance to the local hospital, Mina tries to find Sandra’s daughter to convey her mother’s message:

“Don’t let him in until I’m gone.”

Come and Find Me

“Come and Find Me” tells the story of a recluse who works and lives online must brave the “real world” when her sister goes missing. By assuming the identity of her alter-ego, an avatar who is as fearless as she herself once was, she finds the courage to brave the real world.

But soon she finds herself wondering: Has she become a player in someone else’s game?

Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: Revised & Expanded

Now revised and expanded in a brand new edition with downloadable exercises, Hallie Ephron’s WRITING AND SELLING YOUR MYSTERY NOVEL has become a classic in the field.

A finalist for the Edgar and Anthony awards, it takes the writer from developing a premise, to staking out a plot, to writing a blueprint, crafting a dramatic opening, and on through writing and revising, and publishing. Features more topics, new examples and exercises, but the same comprehensive, hands-on approach and tart advice.