About the Author
DEBORAH DONNELLY’s inspiration for the Carnegie Kincaid series came when she was planning her best friend’s wedding and her own at the same time. (Both turned out beautifully.) A longtime resident of Seattle, Donnelly now lives in Boise, Idaho, with her writer husband and their two Welsh corgis.
Also by Deborah Donnelly
Veiled Threats
Died to Match
May the Best Man Die
Death Takes a Honeymoon
“With her characteristic wit and charm, Donnelly spins another sprightly cozy mystery. . . . As invigorating as a shot of espresso and just as swiftly consumed.”
—Publishers Weekly
And more fabulous praise for
Deborah Donnelly’s
Wedding Planner Mysteries
“Deborah Donnelly’s wedding mysteries are a perfect delight for anyone who has ever contemplated murder while planning a wedding—and isn’t that really all of us?”
—Jerrilyn Farmer, author of the Madeline Bean Catering Mysteries
“Donnelly rings more than wedding bells with her witty writing and frisky female sleuth.”
—Mary Daheim
“Deborah Donnelly blends humor and romance with a clever mix of murder and mayhem. The result is high-speed suspense and wicked fun.”
—Rachel Gibson, USA Today bestselling author
Death Takes a Honeymoon
“Plenty of humor and a bit of romance, [plus] a puzzling mystery and the excitement of danger. If you like intrepid heroines who solve problems with flair, you’ll love Carnegie Kincaid.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“A cozy mystery, and a delight to read.”
—BookLoons
May the Best Man Die
“A bubbly blend of farcical humor and madcap mystery . . . The book’s nonstop action and judiciously doled out clues will keep both romance and mystery lovers riveted until the Dickensian denouement.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Joy to the world! Donnelly returns with long, tall Carnegie Kincaid, who spends Christmas juggling Bridezilla’s wedding, three ardent suitors and a new professional rival. . . . Stuff this one in your stocking!”
—Marcia Talley, award-winning author of
Occasion of Revenge
“Fun for readers of mystery and romance.”
—Portland Oregonian
“Charming, funny, fast and fresh, with an interesting cast of characters and a bubbly mystery swimming throughout.”
—Mystery Reader
Died to Match
“Donnelly infuses this brisk, buoyant cozy with quirky humor and nonstop adventure. Like a slide down the rabbit hole, this compulsively readable mystery gains speed with every turn of the page.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Donnelly is a writer who knows her stuff. This is a great mystery and I highly recommend it.”
—Romantic Times, Top Pick
“Always a bridal consultant, but seemingly doomed to never be a bride, Carnegie Kincaid is the kind of woman anyone would want for a best friend.”
—April Henry, author of Learning to Fly
“Another tasty confection in what is fast becoming my favorite cozy series.”
—Mystery Reader
“If you like amateur sleuths with challenging professions, problematic private lives, and plenty of personality, you’ll truly enjoy [this] series.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“Offers droll humor, interesting background, cunning whodunit misdirection, and what amateur-detective cozies so often lack: real detection from fairly presented clues.”
—Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
Veiled Threats
“Reminiscent of Donna Andrews’s Murder, With Peacocks, this zany mystery is a bubbly blend of farcical humor, romance and intrigue. First-time-author Donnelly will beguile readers with her keen wit and mint descriptions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Donnelly’s fast-moving story and likable sleuth will please readers who like romantic soft-boiled mystery.”
—Booklist
“An entertaining addition to the cozy ranks. With her charm, intuition and the unpredictability of weddings, Carnegie could find herself a very busy sleuth.”
—Mystery Reader
“A nice mix of romance, suspense and humor…Like Elizabeth Peters, Donnelly offers a solid read, lively and entertaining, with a spunky, independent heroine.”
—BookLoons
“An exciting and highly entertaining ride through danger and suspense with a dash of sensuality along the way.”
—Romance Reviews Today
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed You May Now Kill the Bride. If you have comments for me, I’d love to read them; just go to www.deborah donnelly.org and click on “Drop Me a Line.” Send me your wedding stories, too—good, bad, or hilarious. Some readers’ stories have inspired incidents in my books, so you never know!
After that, I invite you to watch for the next book in the Wedding Planner Mysteries, Bride and Doom. Because when a wedding planner plans her own wedding, everything’s bound to unfold perfectly. Isn’t it?
It’s autumn in Seattle, and Made in Heaven has a most unusual client: against everyone else’s better judgment, Carnegie Kincaid is managing her own wedding to Aaron Gold. Determined to fix every bridal mistake she’s ever seen and employ every stylish idea she’s ever had, Carnegie’s shopping for gowns with Lily James and concocting menus with Joe Solveto in a blissful whirl of nuptial nuttiness.
She’s even found a way to pay for the big event, by assisting her old nemesis Beau Paliére with a celebrity wedding. Home-run-hitting superstar Gordo Gutierrez is marrying a punk rocker who calls herself Honeysuckle Hell, and the baseball-themed festivities turn up some familiar faces. Who knew that Buck Buckmeister was a minority owner of the team, or that cake baker Juice Nugent was an old pal of the bride’s?
But two barriers arise between Carnegie and her perfect wedding. First, Aaron is a baseball fanatic, so while she’s dreaming of lilies and lace, he’s busy fretting over fastballs and fielding errors. And second, Gordo’s engagement party is suddenly minus one guest when a much-hated sportswriter is murdered—and Boris the Mad Russian Florist, Carnegie’s former beau, becomes the prime suspect.
Will Carnegie’s passionate defense of Boris give Aaron second thoughts? Can she corner the killer before she turns into Bridezilla? And heaven help us, is there a tactful way to keep her mom’s future stepdaughters, AKA the Bitch Sisters, from muscling in as bridesmaids?
That’s just the beginning of Bride and Doom. Look for it in bookstores in spring 2007. If you send me an e-mail at www.deborahdonnelly.org, I’ll add you to my mailing list for the publication announcement. Thanks for reading!
Cheers
Don’t miss any of Deborah Donnelly’s mysteries in the coast-to-coast-adored series that’s
“A DELIGHTFUL MIX OF BRIDES, BODIES AND MAYHEM. . . A TREAT TO DEVOUR” (BookPage).
Available from Dell Books.
Read on for special excerpts of each—
and look for your copies at your favorite bookseller.
Veiled Threats
on sale now
When love is in the air, Carnegie Kincaid is not far behind. A wedding planner who works out of her Seattle houseboat, Carnegie makes magic—usually . . .
In Veiled Threats, Carnegie agrees to plan a wedding for one of Seattle’s most prominent families—who happen to be going through a high-stakes, headline-grabbing legal war. Before she can get her bride-to-be into just the right dress, a murder and a kidnapping plunge Carnegie into a mystery of extortion and violence . . .
I LOVE THIS MOMENT. YOUNG AND TREMBLING OR CALM and not-so-young, seed pearls or tie-dye, intimate ceremony or extravaganza, this first public appearance of the bride always makes me misty. There’s all the romance that Western culture can bestow: the idea of the fairy princess,
Cinderella, the one and only true love. Not to mention the sheer theater of making a solo entrance in a knockout costume. But it was the courage that caught at my never-married heart. To publicly say, He’s the one; I pledge my life to his life. All the divorce statistics in the world can’t tarnish that moment. That’s the real reason why I help people get married. I’m a sucker for romance.
So I lingered while Diane, bright as a sunrise, took her place beside her chosen man. The candlelight gleamed on her gown and in her eyes, and Jeffrey looked, as all bridegrooms should, like the luckiest fellow on earth. I sighed, dabbed at a tear, and slipped back through the fine old oak-floored dining room into the mansion’s kitchen. I had to track down a pair of antique crystal goblets sent over by the groom’s grandmother this morning, thus setting off the old lady’s tantrum. And I had to ask Joe Solveto, the caterer, where the hell that third waiter was.
The kitchen was crammed with hors d’oeuvres but empty of Joe or anyone else. My stomach growled fiercely at the fans of prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, ranks of crisp snow pea pods piped with velvety salmon mousse, and clusters of green grapes rolled in Roquefort. The wedding cake, three tiers of chocolate hazelnut glory, was already in the dining room, but the old marble countertop along the kitchen wall held a parade of cut-glass dishes piled with petit fours and chocolate-dipped apricots. Surely I could pluck just one apricot from its dish, one tiny cream puff from its pyramid, one oyster from its bed of crushed ice, without disturbing Joe’s fearful symmetry . . .
But no, first things first. I stepped out to the back porch and squinted into the drizzly night, hoping to see the waiter’s headlights. Parked cars were lined up nose-to-tail the whole length of the steep drive leading down to the highway, where a mossy old brick wall bordered the property. I could see my modest white van, nicknamed Vanna White, just uphill from Nickie Parry’s candy-apple-red ’66 Mustang.
The car had been a college graduation gift from Nickie’s father. Douglas Parry owned several department stores, a few Alaskan fish canneries, and a good chunk of downtown Seattle. He was so very fond of Nickie that he’d said the three magic words about her wedding: Money No Object. Fifteen percent of Money No Object was going to put me firmly in the black, for the first time since I’d started Made in Heaven.
Someone else was out in the rain, though: a heavyset figure was striding downhill just beyond the Mustang. His long raincoat flapped as though he were shoving something into a pocket. Car keys, probably. But he was heading away from the house, not toward it, so he couldn’t be my waiter. Well, we’d have to manage with only two. I turned my back on the hissing of the rain and went inside to find Grandmother’s goblets.
I had better luck on this count. The crystal in question, facets winking in the light, had been unwrapped and set on a high shelf out of harm’s way. Also out of reach, even for me, so I pulled over a wooden chair and stood on tiptoe. Just another inch . . . A startling blast of damp air lifted my skirt. Already off balance, I turned abruptly to see a handsome, frowning man enter through the porch door and shake the rain from his windbreaker. My third waiter. The chair wobbled, then tipped over with a clatter, sending me in a harmless but ungraceful leap to the checkerboard tile floor. I saved myself from sprawling flat at the cost of a cracked fingernail and my dignity.
He reached out a hand. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I am,” I snapped, brushing off my dress. The broken nail launched a run in my left stocking. Damn, damn, damn. “But you just barely made it. Where’s your tie?”
He looked down at his heathery sweater, and then down at me. I’m over six feet tall in dress shoes, but he was six four, with wavy chestnut hair and the most distinctive green eyes I’d ever seen on a waiter or anyone else, the glass green of a breaking wave.
“This was the best I could do,” he said coolly. “I just came from the airport.”
“The best you could do!” I kept my voice low, but green eyes or not I was angry. “Black slacks, white shirt, black bow tie. I was very specific! Look, I need those glasses up there.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He mounted the chair, reached up, and handed the goblets down to me. He had broad, tanned hands, still chilly from the rain where they brushed my fingers.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now let’s find the others.”
“Right here, Carnegie.” Joe Solveto’s cunningly mussed sandy hair and narrow, theatrical face appeared in the stairwell leading up from the basement-level pantry. He brandished an unopened champagne bottle. “We’re popping the corks downstairs, but this is the special stuff for the happy pair. I see you found the goblets. Excuse me, sir.”
Sir? Joe relieved me of the glasses and pressed on into the dining room, quickly followed by all three waiters, in their white shirts and black bow ties. Number Three must have arrived during Susie’s sneezing attack. I felt a blush rising from the asymmetrical neckline of my jade silk dress.
“You’re a guest. I’m very sorry. I—”
“My fault.” He had a light tenor voice, surprising in such a large man, and slightly crooked front teeth that showed when he smiled and saved him from being male-model perfect. Not that one objects to perfect strangers. “Obviously I came in the wrong door,” he was saying. “Have I missed everything?”
“Yes. No.” Deep breath. “The ceremony is almost over, but you can slip in the back if you go through the dining room and to your right. I am sorry.”
“No problem,” he said, smiling as he walked by. “You can order me around anytime.”
I stood bemused for a moment, muttering “Who was that masked man?”
Then I got back to work.
Died to Match
on sale now
Luke Skywalker was juggling martini glasses. Albert Einstein was dirty-dancing with Monica Lewinsky. And Zorro was arguing with Death himself. For wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid, it was just another night on the job: a coed bachelor party thrown by one of Seattle’s hippest couples. But what started as the perfect evening ended in disaster: one beautiful bridesmaid was dead, and another had thrown herself into Elliot Bay.
With families to please, dresses to hem, and headlines to grab, Carnegie is discovering the dark side of love and marriage amid high and low Seattle society—and that while some passions may be forever, some are a motive for murder . . .
“WHAT EXACTLY DID YOU DO BETWEEN ELEVEN O’CLOCK and the time you discovered the body?”
I described my circuit through the party, my dance with Zack, the people I recalled seeing on the dance floor, and then meeting Aaron on the stairs and going out on the pier with him. All the while, Officer Lee scribbled away. Graham seemed unsurprised by Corinne’s fall into the harbor; maybe it happened all the time at waterfront parties. I continued on, explaining about my final walk-through routine, and mentioning Aaron’s departure. This time I managed to describe the corpse without tears.
I thought we were finally finished, but instead, the detective began to skip around in the chronology of the party, repeating questions he’d already asked, probing at my memory like a man with a poker stirring at a fire. It’s surprising what you can remember if someone asks the right way. Graham coaxed out details I hadn’t even registered at the time, like the damp patch of drool on Tommy’s leprechaun jacket.
“Would you assume that Mr. Barry had been lying by the pillar for some time?”
“Well, long enough to sit down and then pass out, but it might not have taken long. I expect he was pretty well plowed when he first arrived. Marvin was at the front entrance, he could tell you.”
“He already has. I’m double-checking. Mr. Breen gave us the guest list, and we’ll be interviewing everyone on it, as well as the staff from Solveto’s and the cleaning firm and so forth.” The lieutenant smiled sorrowfully. “Too bad it wasn’t a smaller party. Let’s go back to your encounter with Ms. Montoya in the rest room. Was she taking drugs?”
“What?!”
“It’s a simple question.” Graham sat remarkably stil
l and composed, as if he could do this all day. I suppose he often did. Outside, the rain went on raining, a muffled drumroll against the windows.
“I . . . didn’t see her doing anything like that.” Of course, I suspected that Mercedes blabbed about Talbot only because she was high. But suspicions aren’t facts. “Why do you ask? Were there drugs in her system?”
As before, he ignored me. “You said the two of you talked a bit. What about, exactly?”
I was dreading this question. I’d deliberately glossed over the conversation in my step-by-step account. Mercedes had confided in me—I thought of her now as one of my brides—and it seemed cruel to expose her private life. But facts are facts. And murder is murder.
“She told me she was engaged to be married. To Roger Talbot.”
Graham was startled, though he hid it well, merely elevating one eyebrow a millimeter or two. “That’s . . . quite a piece of news.”
“She said it was a secret, no one knew about it yet.”
“Did you believe her?”
“Well, I didn’t think she bought that ring herself.”
“Which ring? She was wearing several.”
“That was all costume jewelry. She had a diamond ring on a long chain around her neck. She waved it at me and then hid it down her blouse. . . .”
Lightning struck both of us at once. Graham leaned forward. “There was no diamond ring on the corpse.”
“Oh, my God.” I pictured again the bloody rent in Mercedes’ skull, the vulnerable nape of her neck. “No. No, it was gone. I should have realized that last night—”
“Never mind. Can you describe it?”
I closed my eyes and took a breath to steady myself. “A marquise diamond, between two and three-quarter and three carats. Six-prong setting. Pear-cut side stones. Platinum band engraved with leaves. I’m not sure of the size on the side stones, maybe half a carat apiece.”
“Ginny, call that in. And find out if Talbot’s in his office today.” She went to the window and spoke quietly into her cell phone. Graham was looking at me curiously. “She waved it at you and you saw all that?”
You May Now Kill the Bride Page 24