SURVIVAL CAN BE DEADLY (A Discount Detective Mystery #1)

Sleuthing Among Survivalists. Spittle Trivia.

Broke single mom Cameron Chandler has two pre-teens and a live-in, judgmental mother. Desperate for a job, she’s excited to get hired as an investigator at Penny-wise Investigations, a detective agency conveniently located in a suburban shopping mall.

Cameron’s first assignment as a private investigator is to locate a runaway girl. The trail leads to a heavily guarded survivalist camp on a remote island in northern Puget Sound. Armed with a Swiss Army Knife and her on-the-job training, she infiltrates the compound by signing up for a workshop retreat on how to survive a catastrophic event.

Things get tense when this suburban sleuth stumbles across incriminating secrets. She makes a run for it but cannot connect with her trivia-loving backup colleague Yuri Webster, leaving her alone in an unfamiliar island forest pursued by angry, armed men.

Survival Can Be Deadly is Book 1 in the Discount Detective Mystery series, in which a single mom reinvents herself and ends up working as a PI with quirky colleagues, a mysterious boss with a secret past, in an agency whose motto is “Vigilance You Can Afford.”

A country descending into civil war…

A young artist forced to cross a nation in chaos to retrieve her stolen masterpiece…

Her guide and guardian—whose past remains strangely obscure …

Georgie O’Halloran created an artistic and literary wonder—only to have it stolen from her and published under the thief’s name. Worse, it’s the inspiration for a wildly popular video game that’s become a favorite among the militants seeking to transform America through bloodshed.

To confront the plagiarist and reclaim her work, Georgie must cross an entire continent erupting in violence. Her only companion: Shane Riordan, a whip-smart and fiercely loyal friend with a beautiful singing voice, a dark Irish wit, and an oddly encyclopedic memory.

Shane also possesses a keen instinct for survival and combat-hardened fighting skills, both of which will prove crucial as dangers mount, allies abandon them, enemies multiply—and the real forces behind the stolen book’s worldwide success reveal themselves.

It turns out, however, that Georgie isn’t the only one on a cross-country quest. Shane is on a journey all his own, far beyond even Georgie’s imagining.

“What do you have to lose, Kate?” Ryan asked me, as we stood on the bluff looking out on Lake Michigan.

Turns out, almost everything.

When I first moved from Manhattan to this small town six years ago, I worried about many things. I worried about finding a job. I worried that I’d be bored. I worried that my relationship with charming photographer Ryan Breslow was moving too fast. But I never worried about whether the ground beneath my feet would crumble—both literally and figuratively.

My marriage didn’t go as I’d imagined. A year ago, Ryan met his untimely death in a car accident that’s still under investigation. Isolated and alone, all I wanted was to sell my home and leave Crest Lake and its painful memories behind.

But with my home inching ever closer to the edge of the crumbling bluff, the property has become unmarketable. All of us on the lakefront have lost chunks of property, and tempers are at a boiling point about what to do next.

And now, on the evening of a contentious vote about how to fix this pressing issue, my nemesis on the shoreline committee has been murdered. I know how it looks, but it’s not what it seems. But I have to get my plan passed and cash out.

Because I do have secrets.

And they won’t stay buried forever.