Diane Kelly begins a new series with Dead as a Door Knocker, featuring apprentice house flipper Whitney Whitaker and her cat Sawdust. Whitney is an experienced carpenter and property manager, but the house on 
Sweetbriar is her first attempt at rehabbing a house. With the help of her cousin Buck, she dives into the project, dealing with one disaster after another. But a corpse in the flower bed might just be too much—especially since Nashville police detective Collin Flynn thinks Whitney just might have her own motives for putting that corpse under the topsoil. Every bit as enjoyable as Kelly’s previous series: the Death and Taxes series featuring the hilarious misadventures of IRA special agent Tara Hollway and the Paw and Order series featuring accidental K9 officer Megan Luz and her furry partner Sergeant Brigit. I’ll be looking forward to the next installment.
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Nancy Cole Silverman’s Shadow of Doubt is the first in a series of mysteries featuring Carol Childs, a radio station news reporter in Los Angeles. When her neighbor, a talent agent, is accused of murdering the head of her agency (who is also her rather controlling aunt), Carol jumps to her defense, while balancing her relatively new job, her young teenage son, and her FBI agent lover. The 
“Hollywood Bathtub Murders” soon become a sensation; the case involves agents, actors, scandal, bath salts, and more than a touch of Hollywood noir. An entertaining beginning to another series from Henery Press.
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The Crossword Murder is the first in a long-running series by Nero Blanc (a husband-and-wife writing team). I downloaded it because (a) I love crossword puzzles, (b) it was the first installment, and (c) it was on sale. I’m not sure it lived up to my expectations. The story was a reasonably engaging mystery, and I particularly enjoyed the budding (but very low key) 
romance between the two protagonists, private detective Rosco Polycrates and crossword editor Belle Graham. The book includes several crossword puzzles (which can be downloaded and printed from the OpenRoad Media site, but beware—some of the answers on the site are in error, although they are correct in the back of the book), but I found those too much tied into the narrative to be entertaining as independent puzzles.
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I enjoyed the book enough to finish it, and if I run across another in the series on sale I may download it, but I’m in no rush to do so. (There’s a Hallmark Mystery Movie with this title on the horizon, but it doesn’t appear to be related to this book.)
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The Big Chihuahua is the third outing for apprentice private investigator Geri Sullivan and her talking (but only to her) Chihuahua Pepe, stars of Waverly Curtis’ Barking Detective series. This time around, Geri and Pepe go undercover among the followers of Dogawanda, a cult devoted to the Way of the Dog, with a leader, as you might expect, devoted largely to herself.
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The object of Geri’s investigation turns up dead, and someone from her past turns up very much alive. Geri’s 
boss, Jimmy G (who only refers to himself in the third person) comes along, hoping to score enough moolah to avoid eviction from his office.
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A talking Chihuahua assistant private investigator is a pretty silly premise, but Pepe is such a charmer (and mostly level-headed Geri is a lot of fun, too) that I enjoy the series. It runs to five books, and I have two more stashed on my Kindle.
Killalot
seventh novel featuring Fort Worth Police Officer Megan Luz and her K-9 partner, Brigit. This time the action begins when a man drops a newborn baby off at the fire station where Megan’s boyfriend Seth and Brigit’s boyfriend Blast work. This is perfectly legal under Texas’ Baby Moses law, but when Megan unfolds the beautifully hand-made quilt the baby is wrapped in, she finds an embroidered plea for help. There just may be something going on outside the law after all, and Megan intends to find out.
Stephanie Plum returns in Janet Evanovich’s 
with 
island where much of her father’s family lives. Maggie and her friend and assistant P.I. Lenny are doing undercover work for their newly established Movie Reel Investigations when they find a body in a bathtub. And that’s not the last body Maggie, widely known as a corpse magnet, will find in the course of the book. Throw in a half dozen Bad Santas, some odd behavior on the part of Liam Reynolds, Maggie’s police officer boyfriend, and the unexpected arrival of Maggie’s estranged sister Beth, now a famous beauty vlogger, and you have the ingredients for another tale combining mayhem and laughter. 
a young widow (she solved her husband’s murder in 
Kay Hudson 