Arsenic & Old Ladies II
(2026)Festive Fatalities
(The second book in the Arsenic & Old Ladies series)
A novel by Maggie Shayne
From Maggie Shayne, a darkly funny holiday crime caper featuring four sixty-something BFFs, a blackmailer who knows exactly what they did last spring, and a Christmas that turns lethal before the stockings are even hung.
This year, the naughty list is a hit list.
The girls—four sixty-something besties—are counting on their best Christmas yet. The kids are home, the families are together, and for once everything feels merry and bright. Then teen mom Ruby Duncan corners Diane in a snowy mall parking lot, and holiday cheer takes a deadly back seat.
Ruby, a former victim of the late and unlamented ‘Dangerous Dan’ Fitzpatrick, wants cash and a sample of the dead man’s DNA to blackmail his formidable widow. If Diane doesn’t deliver, Ruby will tell the police exactly who killed Fitzpatrick.
Meanwhile, Bonnie realizes a fifteen-year-old student has been missing for a week—and fears the girl has fallen into the same trafficking ring she and her friends stumbled onto last spring. They’d stopped three of the ten men responsible. Not on purpose, but still. The rest scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on. Now they’re back at it.
As Bonnie’s detective son closes in on a vigilante hunting predators in his town, the cabal’s powerful members decide they’ve had quite enough of the relentless sexagenarian avengers determined to shut them down—and they mean to deal with the problem permanently.
Perfect for readers who love:
– Dark comedy holiday crime capers
– Vigilante grandmothers and fierce lifelong friendship
– Wintry, Christmas-set small-town suspense
– A blackmail plot, buried secrets, and deadly stakes
Genre: Cozy Mystery
This year, the naughty list is a hit list.
The girls—four sixty-something besties—are counting on their best Christmas yet. The kids are home, the families are together, and for once everything feels merry and bright. Then teen mom Ruby Duncan corners Diane in a snowy mall parking lot, and holiday cheer takes a deadly back seat.
Ruby, a former victim of the late and unlamented ‘Dangerous Dan’ Fitzpatrick, wants cash and a sample of the dead man’s DNA to blackmail his formidable widow. If Diane doesn’t deliver, Ruby will tell the police exactly who killed Fitzpatrick.
Meanwhile, Bonnie realizes a fifteen-year-old student has been missing for a week—and fears the girl has fallen into the same trafficking ring she and her friends stumbled onto last spring. They’d stopped three of the ten men responsible. Not on purpose, but still. The rest scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on. Now they’re back at it.
As Bonnie’s detective son closes in on a vigilante hunting predators in his town, the cabal’s powerful members decide they’ve had quite enough of the relentless sexagenarian avengers determined to shut them down—and they mean to deal with the problem permanently.
Perfect for readers who love:
– Dark comedy holiday crime capers
– Vigilante grandmothers and fierce lifelong friendship
– Wintry, Christmas-set small-town suspense
– A blackmail plot, buried secrets, and deadly stakes
Genre: Cozy Mystery