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I wanted to share the Family Skeleton Mystery Series books I won from Diversion Books in December, but I wasn’t able to get to it. Still…here’s a couple of Leigh Perry’s stories to curl up with on a cold winter’s day.

The covers are amazingly fun and addictive, but I don’t know who created them.

Publisher: Diversion Books

Amazon / Audible / Goodreads

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW FOR THE SKELETON PAINTS A PICTURE

OMG I want to have a dance party with Georgia and Sid in this humorous mystery of theft and murder with dialogue and situations that almost had me rolling around on the floor with laughter and amazement.

 GOODREADS BLURB

Georgia Thackery, adjunct English professor, has a new job teaching at Falstone College of Art and Design, known as FAD to its students and faculty. Living in a borrowed bungalow during winter in the snowiest part of Massachusetts, Georgia feels her isolation weighing as heavily as the weather. Then she receives a package containing her best friend, Sid, a walking, talking skeleton who has lived with the Thackery family since Georgia was six. With Georgia working out of town, Sid was lonely too.

The two of them make plans for a cozy semester together, and it might have worked out that way if Sid hadn’t snuck out in the middle of the night to play in the snow and spotted a crashed car. When he drags Georgia out to investigate, they find the driver behind the wheel, apparently dead from the collision.

Initially, police think it’s an accident, so Georgia and Sid think that’s the end of it―until Georgia finds out the body hits closer to home than she’d realized…

Amazon / Audio / Goodreads

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW FOR THE SKELETON MAKES A FRIEND

This creatively written cozy mystery swept me up and carried me away, through lots of danger with plenty of suspects that kept me guessing while I laughed my way through it, step by step, with fabulously funny characters and dialogue.

GOODREADS BLURB

Georgia Thackery is feeling pretty good about her summer job teaching at prestigious Cattenhall College, and she’s renting a rustic cabin right by a lake for herself, her daughter, Madison, and her best friend, Sid the Skeleton. Together again, the trio are enjoying the quiet when a teenager named Judy shows up looking for her friend. Georgia doesn’t recognize the name, but she learns that the person Judy was looking for is actually Sid.

Sid reveals that he and Judy are part of a regular online gaming group that formed locally, and one of their members has gone missing. Sid admits that he might have bragged about his investigative prowess, enough so that Judy wants him to find their missing player. Given that Sid doesn’t have many friends IRL―none, really, unless you count the Thackery family―Georgia agrees to help him search. They manage to discreetly enlist Judy, who lives in town, and follow the clues to… a dead buddy. Now they’ve got a killer on their hands. Probing the life of Sid’s friend, they realize a lot is wrong both on campus and in the seemingly quaint town, and someone doesn’t want them looking deeper.

ABOUT LEIGH PERRY

I was once asked why I’d chosen to write a mystery about an ambulatory skeleton. I replied that it was because of the old adage: Write what you know. After all, we’re all skeletons under the skin. And flesh, and tendons, and all that other messy stuff. After that, the woman decided not to ask me any more questions.

Seriously, I’m not sure why I decided to write about a walking, talking skeleton named Sid. All I remember for sure is that I can track the idea back to May of 2004. I told my husband about Sid–he was always named Sid–then wrote a few pages and sent to my beta-reading pals to see if they thought there was a book in it. All three of them seemed to think it would work, and I did some initial research and planning, but other projects intervened and I didn’t pick it up again until 2011. That’s when I was pitching ideas for a new series to my agent and editor, and I put together a packet of eight. Both the agent and editor them zoomed in on Sid’s story. I guess they’re skeletons under the skin, too.

As you might guess from the idea of a walking, talking skeleton, A Skeleton in the Family is a paranormal mystery. I was inspired by old TV shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir to write about a world that’s pretty much like the real one, with one key difference. In this case: Sid.

Sid has been part of Georgia Thackery’s family since she was a little girl, but only she, her sister Deborah, and their parents know about him. Not even Georgia’s teenaged daughter Madison has met him. But when Georgia and Madison move to the family home so Georgia can take a job at the local university, it’s a whole lot tougher to hide him up in the attic. Then Sid spots a person he recognizes from when he was more traditionally alive, and old memories start to surface. He wants to know where he came from. Georgia agrees to help him solve his own murder, but when they find a much fresher murder victim, it gets a whole lot more complicated. That’s the story of the first book in the series, A Skeleton in the Family.

The Skeleton Makes a Friend, the fifth in the Family Skeleton series, was released in November 2018.

The Family Skeleton series mysteries are my first mysteries, but not really. Under the name Toni L.P. Kelner I’ve published eleven novels and twenty-somthing short stories, and have co-edited six urban fantasy anthologies with New York Times best seller Charlaine Harris. I’ve adopted a pen name because this is a new series, and because paranormal novels are a departure for me. But it’s still me! So if you like Toni L.P. Kelner’s books, you might like the Family Skeleton series, too. If you don’t like Kelner’s books, forget I said anything — I never even heard of that Kelner woman.

Though I was born in Pensacola, FL and raised in Charlotte, NC, I’ve been living north of Boston, MA for 30 years or so and raised both my daughters there. I share the house with my husband, one of the daughters, a guinea pig, and an ever-increasing number of books.

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