A Dinah Pelerin Mystery

Dinah Pelerin’s wealthy American uncle, dying of cancer, has summoned his entire family to a remote lodge in upper Australia, where he intends to end his life. Dinah hopes to at last learn the truth about her father, who died while committing a felony when she was a child. But the truth, she discovers, has darker ramifications than she’d bargained on.

A wedding on the edge of a Hawaiian volcano sounds risky to Dinah Pelerin, the bride’s best friend and maid of honor. The bride, Claude Ann Kemper, has bet her heart that she’s found the right man at last. The groom has gone all in on a real estate deal that he believes will set him and his new wife up for life. But Hawaii is a tinderbox of ancient myths and modern conflicts over who should control the land so cherished by its native people. A group of native Hawaiians claims that the sacred bones of an ancestral king are buried on the land that the groom plans to sell, and one of them has vowed do whatever it takes to stop him.

No fortress can protect against human corruption, not even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. When Dinah Pelerin left sunny Hawaii on an undercover fact-finding mission to the seed vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, she had no idea that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering, that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife, or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms.

In 1973, on a remote beach on the Greek island of Samos, a movie star named Marilita Stephan murdered her boyfriend, his mother, and a powerful colonel in the military junta, a crime for which she was executed. Forty years later, Dinah Pelerin arrives on Samos to spend the summer with her Norwegian boyfriend, Thor, before she joins an archaeological dig nearby. Thor, a policeman on sabbatical, seems unduly fascinated by the 1973 murders, and Dinah soon discovers that he had more in mind than romance when he chose the island of Samos as their holiday destination.