Book Cover & Blurb: Death by Misadventure

VETERAN PLAYWRIGHT AND NOVELIST DEBUTS AS MYSTERY WRITER

Death by Misadventure first in a new mystery series

San Francisco, CA – E. E. (Evelyn Eileen) Smith, has begun a new phase of her writing career with the publication of her first mystery, Death by Misadventure.  The e-book, $3.99 ISBN: 978-0-9899356-0-9, which was released on November 16, 2013 by Phoenix International, Inc., is the first in a series featuring a fictional young private eye, Alexis J. Smith and her detective agency called Discreet Inquiries, in a post-WW II setting. Early reviewers have called the work “insightful,” “unique” and “having wonderful references to the 1940s, and a wise-cracking young female gumshoe.”

The sign on her office door reads, “ALEXIS J. SMITH – Discreet Inquiries,” but a new client of her fledgling detective agency seems to think it means Murder Incorporated. The client, one Kate Faraday, is a former schoolmate (Sacramento High, class of ’41) who wants to hire Lexie to find her husband, Frank. During their initial interview it becomes clear that she doesn’t want him back “dead or alive,” she wants him dead!

If it were anyone else, the intrepid young private investigator would never have taken the job, but there is a problem. Lexie herself has been in love with Frank ever since they were all together in high school. She makes a desperate decision to find him and warn him of his wife’s mad intentions.

She travels to England and finds Frank staying at a country inn called The Old Vicarage, next to a little Norman church still haunted by a 12th Century ghost. What she discovers reveals a woman bent on vengeance, not only on her husband, but on Lexie, as well. Are they both marked for murder? How all this plays out, and culminates in a shoot-out at The Old Vicarage, is the climax of the story — but not the end.

About the book: Death by Misadventure by E. E. Smith ISBN: 978-0-9899356-0-9 Publisher: Phoenix International, Inc. Date of publish: November 2013 Pages: 181 S.R.P.: $3.99

About the author: E. E. Smith lives close to her native San Francisco where, after many years as a playwright, she now writes books and short stories instead of plays.  One story was published in Writers’ Forum:  Britain’s Best Magazine for Writers, in 2006. The play, WARTIME RECIPES, first performed in Oklahoma City in 1998, was reprised there in 2010. Her first novel, BOARDINGHOUSE STEW, was published in 2009, and the New Edition published in 2011. The second novel, TIMES LIKE THESE, was also published in 2011, and IN LOVE AND WAR, a memoir, was published in 2012.  She debuted as a mystery writer with Death by Misadventure in 2013. At least three more books in the series will follow in 2014 and beyond.