Nancy Lynn Jarvis

Mags and the AARP Gang

Mags and her gang of renegade octogenarians have a deadline. They have to rob Bayside Community Bank, the bank about to foreclose on the mobile home park where they live, by a week from Friday so they can pay off the mortgage and save their homes. They’ve cased the joint, planned carefully, assembled their disguises, rehearsed their every move — what could possibly go wrong? Plenty. Some people th ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Corpse's Secret Life

Pat’s fledgling private investigation company, PIP Inc., has a promising new case. Pat is still wearing a wrist cast after breaking her arm in a confrontation with a killer, so when she’s hired by the City of Watsonville to unearth the identity of an older woman who died in her bed, she’s delighted that her next job promises to be a simple computer-based research project. Why is it that things are ...

The Glass House

At thirty-four, Santa Cruz County Law Librarian Pat Pirard is living her perfect life. She has a job she loves, she’s just purchased her dream car, and she is almost over being dumped by her long term boyfriend. But her thirty-fifth birthday marks the end of life as she knows it, and Pat has to reinvent herself. As a birthday present, Pat’s best friend enrolls her in a glass flower making class. S ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
Buying Murder

Murder gets personal when human remains are found in the beach cottage that real estate agents Regan McHenry and her husband, Tom Kiley, buy. The murder victim has been hidden away for sixteen years, and although the authorities quickly discover his identity, the trail to his killer is cold after so many years. Regan has sworn off playing amateur detective, but when it becomes clear the police hav ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Two-Faced Triplex

Regan signs on to play consoler-and-chief after the body of Martha Varner, one of her favorite clients, is found and the woman’s distraught daughter begs Regan to stop escrow from closing on a purchase her mother was about to make. Martha Varner’s death, at first ruled suicide, is quickly ruled homicide. The dead woman’s best friend thinks she knows who Martha’s killer is. The police have a differ ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Corpse's Secret Life

Pat’s fledgling private investigation company, PIP Inc., has a promising new case. Pat is still wearing a wrist cast after breaking her arm in a confrontation with a killer, so when she’s hired by the City of Watsonville to unearth the identity of an older woman who died in her bed, she’s delighted that her next job promises to be a simple computer-based research project. Why is it that things are ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
Backyard Bones

It’s not the first time Regan has experienced déjà-vu. But when the sensation involves finding a second body buried where one was found just weeks before, déjà-vu takes on new meaning. Someone murdered a girl on her seventeenth birthday and, as Regan delves into the motive behind the girl’s murder, she discovers many people are trying to hide secrets about their entanglement with the dead teenager ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
A Neighborly Killing

Waking up to gunshots and discovering the body of their neighbor just outside their bedroom door is bad enough, but when the Coroner rules the death a suicide, Realtors Regan McHenry and her husband Tom Kiley don’t believe it for a minute. Never mind what the physical evidence says; they heard their dead neighbor arguing with someone in the moments preceding his death. What really happened has bec ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Widow's Walk League

Santa Cruz husbands are being murdered. The local news media is buzzing because a dark-clad figure witnesses describe as Death has been seen lurking nearby each time a murder is committed. When new widows start hiring real estate agent Regan McHenry to sell their houses, she discovers all the murdered men have something in common: their wives belong to a walking group called The Widow’s Walk Leagu ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Death Contingency

Regan McHenry, is a Santa Cruz realtor, whose work puts her in the midst of mystery, mayhem and even murder. The amateur crime solver uses tools and techniques she’s learned during her career and skills she’s honed as a keen observer of human nature to solve mysteries ─ just not always soon enough to stay out of trouble. She’s aided in her sleuthing by her husband, Tom Kiley, a former computer pro ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Funeral Murder

In The Glass House, the first book in the PIP Inc. Mysteries series Pat Pirard, recently downsized Santa Cruz Law Librarian, needed to find a new job in a hurry. She printed business cards announcing she was Private Investigator Pat and crossed her fingers, hoping she could earn enough money working for attorneys as a PI to survive. Pat’s first investigation went well, so she’s excited when she ge ...

Category Mystery-Cozy
The Murder House

Every community has a house that people walk by hurriedly, nervously peeking at it out of the corners of their eyes. Bonny Doon is no exception. A bloody double homicide occurred in the Murder House almost twenty years ago and the killer has eluded capture ever since. Recently the house was inherited and the new owner wants to sell. The problem is no one wants to buy a house with a reputation and ...

Category Mystery-Cozy