Do you love a literary mystery? Here are mine.

American Queen by Ginger Moran

American Queen: An Agatha Wells Novel

Agatha Wells is the wife to a CIA spy, the mother to five small boys, and the daughter to affluent Quaker parents. She even holds a PhD in Behavioral Economics.

But Agatha Wells is also lonely.

With her husband always disappearing, she finds herself desperate for distractions. Her doctorate would ordinarily have opened up a career for her, but as the wife of a spy, she is tied to DC. As a mother of five, she might have been distracted by her children and school activities, but her English nanny has much of that area covered. As a Washington, DC socialite, her extravagant parties—complete with prominent political figures—usually fill the void. But Agatha yearns to show people there’s more to her than diplomatic royalty.

The Body of Summer

The themes in Body have to do with love and family, the South, academia, class, inexplicable passion, proper proportion, and what matters in the long run. The entire novel takes place in the summer months in Virginia, which as anyone who’s been through summer in the South knows, have a character all their own.

Dr. Kendall Grant, English professor at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville native, has a deep need to know. When her ex-husband, a contractor, is suspected of murdering a young woman, a graduate student in Kendall’s own department, Kendall gets involved. With every reason in the world to stay out of a situation her ex-husband might have caused, why? It is because, despite all the lies he has told her, she believes finally she can know the truth about Colin.

The Algebra of Snow

A hard-nosed mathematician’s life is endangered as she takes a psychological and spiritual journey into the terrain of frozen passion and grief. Mathematics professor Amelia Grant takes her two dogs and escapes her crumbling marriage, returning to her beloved Adirondack Mountains. But she finds them very different in winter. Always able to reduce her life to a formula and used to being alone, she finds her usual methods don’t work in this extreme of winter. She is haunted by the memory of passion as her grip on reality loosens and her life is endangered on her descent into the frozen terrain of her mother’s early death.