Meg Perry's Blog

Are you ready for a new Angeles Investigations mystery? Annoyed to Death, Angeles #7, is up for preorder and will be published on Friday, 9/26!

Smashwords, Nook, Kobo, and all non-Amazon versions are here.

Amazon versions are here. Print will be coming soon.

Bashed with a bust of Bach.

Brenda Gillette was the most annoying person that everyone who knew her had ever met. She made up arbitrary and absurd rules and regulations then imposed them upon both her husband and her fellow choir members at St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church in Santa Monica. But whose annoyance would have turned to anger? Was it her husband, who spent every day on the golf course to avoid her? Was it the choir director, who battled Brenda for control of the choir? Was it one of the choir members, who’d finally had enough?

Nobody’s talking. But someone knows something. If they won’t talk to the cops, maybe they’ll talk to a couple of new choir members. Angeles Investigations is hired to infiltrate the choir and listen to the gossip about who might have killed Brenda.

The only problem with that? No one at Angeles can read music.

Almost no one.

Jamie Brodie Mystery #24

I have been a terrible correspondent lately, but I promise you, I am writing! As proof, here is the cover for the next book, Introduced to Death, which is a Jamie Brodie mystery. Yep, when I said I was done with the series, I lied. LOL. Introduced to Death is available for preorder at Amazon and, because I messed up, all of you who don’t use Amazon can get the book early! It’s now available at Smashwords, Nook, Kobo, and several other retailers. Here’s the link.

And if you’re a Kindle user or you want print, you can preorder now! Publication date is June 27.

Here’s the link for Amazon.

I am hard at work on Angeles Investigations #7, which has nearly 20K words but no title yet.

Also, Mailchimp has apparently done away with their free accounts, and I’m not paying them to produce a newsletter. I hadn’t put one out for so long anyway, I’m just going to discontinue that for now.

Here’s the blurb for Introduced to Death. Enjoy!

It’s 1997 in Oceanside, California. Jamie Brodie is turning seventeen. His grandfather hasn’t spoken to him for nearly two years, ever since Jamie came out to his family. But Jamie’s concerns are mostly centered on his grades, because it will take a near-perfect GPA to get into Berkeley. He’s busy with Advanced Placement classes; spending time with his “friend with benefits,” Robbie Harrison; and his weekend landscaping job with his best friend, Ali Fortner. 

Then Jamie and Ali find one of their elderly customers, Eugene Vasilaros, dead in his home. 

Everybody adored Mr. Vasilaros. Or so Jamie thought. As he, Ali, and Mel Hayes dig into the history of their beloved hometown, they discover how a long-simmering resentment can explode into violence.

You probably think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth. No, I’ve just been disorganized and distracted. I’m allowing external factors to harsh my vibe, and that’s all I’ll say about THAT.

Anyway! Spotted to Death, Angeles Investigations #6, is available for preorder now! Pub date is 3/21, next Friday. Remember, if you’re boycotting Amazon, there are plenty of other choices to buy my books. (And I make a lot more money per book from the other sites, even though you pay the same amount.) Kindle Unlimited has never worked for me and I’ll never use it again.

Spotted to Death everywhere but Amazon

Spotted to Death for Kindle and print

If you’ve ever been curious about airport operations, this is a tiny look into that subject. ALSO. After consultation with others, I didn’t put a content warning at the beginning of the book, but be advised that this one includes a major act of violence.

“LA Tower, Southwest 2298. There’s someone lying on the top deck of the parking garage.”

When a passenger on an arriving flight spots a body on top of a garage at LAX, the mystery seems like a routine whodunit. Then another tragedy draws Angeles Investigations and the LAPD into a web of lies and deceit that extends to Mexico and beyond. The Brodie brothers are forced to face some of their own demons, and the rest of the team wonders – what happens when justice can’t be served?

Tojamilah.daly@angelesinvestigations.com; kevin.brodie@angelesinvestigations.com;  ryan.mckinney@angelesinvestigations.com; avery.roth@angelesinvestigations.com; jamie.brodie@angelesinvestigations.comCcaaron.quinn@usc.edu; anisha.pandit@lacounty.gov; kristen.beach@ucla.edu; brad.foster@santamonica.gov; pete.ferguson@gmail.comBcc SubjectOperations this weekHi everyone,   I would have sent a group text, but figured the message would be too long. I’ve heard from all of you separately, so I just wanted to clarify where everyone is now, since we’re all scattered to the winds (no pun intended) by this fire.  

Jamilah and Anisha’s house is fine, but the air quality in Pasadena is still terrible and the power is out. They’re staying at Jamilah’s parents in South Central until the power is restored.
 
Kevin and Kristen’s house is not in the evacuation warning area, but is very close. Kevin is still at home until the evacuation becomes mandatory, if it does, at which point he’ll stay with Pete. Kristen is already in Oceanside, staying with Kevin’s brother and working remotely since UCLA is all remote this week.  

Ryan and Brad, and Avery, are fine where they are in Venice, and working remotely. Ryan has the Angeles phone forwarded to his.  

Jamie has been at his dad’s in Oceanside since the fires started to protect his lungs. Pete is still at home.  

As you know, the office is in the evacuation warning area. Aaron and I were staying at the apartment, but now we’ve come back to Pasadena. They tell us our power will be on by the end of the day. It’s very smoky.  

Jamilah, Kevin, and I have decided that if someone wants to hire us this week, we’ll meet with them at the LA Central Library downtown. We have the Square terminal with us for payments if needed. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would be in need of a PI this week, but we wanted to be prepared. Most of the city is fine, after all.  

That’s all for now. You all stay safe and keep in touch. If anything changes, please Reply All to this email.  

Let’s hope this is over by next Monday.  

Rob

(Just a note from Meg: don’t try to use any of these email addresses. LOL. You might turn up someone we don’t want to know.)

Is it appropriate to say happy new year? We’re only eleven days in and already surrounded by disaster. I hope your first eleven days has been disaster-free.

Jeff Turner, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As you know, there are terrible fires in Los Angeles. One reader asked about this, so I thought the rest of you might be wondering. There are a couple of conversations in Stolen to Death (out now, in case you didn’t know) where Jamie and Pete both comment on the fire hazard of living in Mandeville Canyon. I’m cringing now because I don’t like being a prophet. The houses along Mandeville Canyon Road are under evacuation orders, and the fire trucks are on the road, preparing to defend the homes against the Palisades fire which is headed that way. Jim and Rhea Perkins and their neighbors, and St. Chad’s Monastery, have all been forced to find other shelter.

The next stop after Mandeville Canyon for the fire would be Brentwood. (Mandeville Canyon is in Brentwood, if you want to get technical.) The Angeles Investigations office is safe, since it’s in the lower section of Brentwood, but Ali and Mel’s house is in the potential danger zone.

I’ve been trying to find out whether the house I chose for Mike Day and his partner Austin is still standing, and I can’t. Obviously things are still in flux, and part of Pacific Palisades is still in some danger.

The air quality in parts of LA is terrible. As soon as the fires started, I’m sure that Jamie and Ammo headed for Oceanside, where Jamie is now working remotely from his dad’s house. He took Ammo so that Pete wouldn’t have to go outside as often. Pete has stayed to support the Dodgers employees. There are 500 non-player staff, and according to the Dodgers statement, some of them have lost their homes.

And then there’s Pasadena, which is directly south of Altadena, where thousands of homes have been destroyed. I don’t think Pasadena is in any danger of burning, but I believe there are power outages and drinking water restrictions in place. Rob and Aaron are probably staying at the apartment in Brentwood, and Jamilah and Anisha have probably gone to Jamilah’s parents in South Central, which is far away from the fires. I expect that Jamilah is working remotely, too.

I may be nuts, but I’m going to LA next week. I’ll be staying with a friend in Hawthorne, south of LAX, which is in no danger. I’m sure I’ll be breathing some smoke, but that’s no biggie for me. I’ve done it before…

In 1998, we lived through the Florida Firestorm. We had a wet winter, but then it quit raining in March. The fires started at Memorial Day and didn’t stop until mid-July, which is the first rain we’d had since March. My county is 1,000,000 acres; 200,000 of that burned. Twenty percent. The county just to the north of us, Flagler County, ordered the entire county to evacuate. I lived inland then, right across the street from an evacuation zone, and had flaming chunks of palmetto falling on my house and yard. Fortunately, none of the houses burned. Two years later, I moved to the beach, where there is no forest and we’re safe from wildfire.

I’d much rather deal with hurricanes. We can see them coming and get out of the way with days of warning, not minutes.

Anyway! I’m going to LA to look at locations for the next couple of books. We were going to take a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway; I doubt that’ll happen now. One of the locations is Oceanside; I’ll finally get to see the house I chose for Dave, almost 13 years ago. Can you believe it?

The next book takes place this past December, about three weeks before the fires started. It feels so strange, to be writing the book knowing what’s coming but having to ignore it because, in the book, it hasn’t happened yet.

Stuff like these fires is why I don’t publish before the book has “happened” in the Brodieverse.

Wherever you are, stay safe.

Happy Boxing Day! I hope your holidays are treating you well. Good news: Stolen to Death, Angeles Investigations #5, is now up for preorder! Here are the links:

Kindle and Print

All other platforms including Smashwords

Jadon Perkins, age 16, is found dead at his high school track. Jadon ran track and cross-country and was dressed for practice, but there are no witnesses and no obvious cause of death. The autopsy is inconclusive pending toxicology results.

Carlos Maroto, age 28, slides into second base at Dodger Stadium, in front of 56,000 fans, and doesn’t get up. Everyone assumes that he suffered some kind of cardiac event. But the autopsy shows that Carlos was perfectly healthy.

Jadon Perkins’s parents want to know what happened to their only child, and they hire Angeles Investigations to find out.

The Los Angeles Dodgers want to know what happened to their star center fielder, and they hire Angeles Investigations to find out.

Each case will force Jamilah, Kevin, and Rob to seek help from people they hoped they’d never have to see again.

And Pete Ferguson is about to begin the best undercover assignment EVER.

Most of you may know that I always contribute a Brodieverse crossover to Josh Lanyon’s Advent Calendar. That’s coming up SOON and I do not have any ideas about who to feature this year. I’m thinking of using the Holmes and Moriarity characters, but they live in San Francisco (where Jamie and Pete would never venture voluntarily, it’s a SoCal vs. NorCal thing).

Do you all have any ideas about anything you’d like to see? It can involve any of Josh’s characters.

Let me know!! And thanks!!

(In other news, the fifth Angeles book is finished and being read by the critique group now. It’ll be out as scheduled in December. More on that later.)

Chris Downer [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we go! Disappeared to Death, Angeles Investigations #4, is now available for preorder on Kindle. It’ll be out everywhere, but the preorders aren’t up yet at other sites. They should be coming within a day or two – I’m still not sure how Draft2Digital does all that.

Anyway! Here’s the link for Amazon preorder.

Two missing persons. Two wildly differing circumstances.

Juliette Page, an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s, disappeared in the company of her caretaker twelve hours ago. Her daughter, Cynthia Hayes, is frantic and flies from Florida to LA to find her mother. Cynthia’s stepdaughter, Melanie Hayes, enlists the aid of her friends at Angeles Investigations to find Juliette.

While helping Alison Fortner on a landscaping job, Kristen Beach is digging a hole to plant a tree when she uncovers a skeleton. Nothing is certain except that the bones have been buried for a very long time. The owner of the property, Kent Fisher, hires Angeles to clear him of any involvement in the skeleton’s death. But who did Kristen find? How long have they been missing? Did anyone look for them? Is a family still searching?

Or is the truth something much worse?

Where has the summer gone? Between traveling, watching the Olympics obsessively, and a mild case of Covid, I’ve almost completely missed it. Kids here go back to school next Monday!

Here’s an unedited chapter from the next Angeles Investigations book, Disappeared to Death, Angeles #4. Publication will be in September; you’ll get plenty of notice.

Kristen

Holmby Hills

Saturday, June 1

The Holmby Hills section of LA was less well known than its neighbors Beverly Hills and Bel Air, but plenty of entertainment figures and other wealthy people had lived there over the years. Despite the fact that Sunset Boulevard ran right through the center of it, it was almost entirely residential. 

Kristen had been to plenty of parties in Holmby Hills when she was married to her first husband, a neurosurgeon named Daniel Corbin. But she’d never been to Graham Kirtley and Kent Fisher’s house. She knew the couple had been together for years; she also remembered that they’d bought this house together while she was going through her divorce from Daniel. Graham, her divorce attorney, had mentioned it at some point.

Even though she knew that Graham and Kent were wealthy, she was still surprised at the size of their house. An estate, almost, on what must be an acre lot. Kevin looked over at her, amused. “I guess you helped pay for this.”

“No way. I might have paid for the exterior paint.”

He laughed. “Wait ‘til you see the back.”

“That’s right, I keep forgetting that you’ve been here before.”

“Under less pleasant circumstances.” Kevin and his then-partner, Jon Eckhoff, had been the detectives who investigated the murder that took place during Kent and Graham’s wedding.

“Yeah. That was around the time you and I started dating.”

“Almost exactly.”

Kevin parked beside Ryan’s vintage Ford Bronco, and they met the rest of the group at the front of the house, where Ali was arranging everyone in work groups.

Kevin had known Ali since they were both toddlers. She was Jamie’s age, 44, and the two of them had gone all the way from kindergarten through high school together. Ali had attended UC-Davis to major in landscape architecture. After graduation, Ali and her then-girlfriend, Melanie Hayes, had moved to LA so that Mel could attend UCLA’s law school. Ali went to work for a landscaping company then finally saved enough money to strike out on her own. 

At first, Cactus Flower Xeriscaping consisted of Ali and a pickup truck full of tools. But, as California’s drought deepened, xeriscaping became more popular, and Ali’s business grew. Now she employed eleven people full-time, all women except for Drew Jemison, and had to occasionally turn down jobs because she didn’t have time to complete them by the deadline that the property owner demanded.

Kristen hadn’t met Ali until after she met Kevin, but they’d quickly become friends. And Mel Hayes, now Ali’s wife, was Kristen and Kevin’s lawyer.

Ali said, “All right, everyone’s here! Thanks so much for coming. First, some logistics. Graham and Kent aren’t home, but they’ve given me the key to their pool house. The bathroom is in there, and there’s a fridge which I filled up with bottled water and, for the Brodie contingent, Cokes.”

Everyone laughed. Kevin and Jamie’s love for Coke Classic was widely known. 

“You’ll see paving stones already placed in shapes. We have a diagram to indicate which kind of rock goes in which shape.” There were a dozen huge mounds of different styles and colors of decorative stones resting on the dirt near the house. Two mounds consisted of mulch.

 Ali continued. “Outside the shapes, we’ll be using the Mexican beach pebbles. The mulch goes around the base of the plantings. We won’t spread mulch until we’re done planting, obviously, and we won’t spread the Mexican beach pebbles until we’re done filling in the other shapes. I’ve assigned each of you from Angeles to work with one of my team. If you have any questions, they can answer them.”

Rob said, “Let’s get at this.”

“All right! Here’s how we’re paired. Rob, you’re with Kimmie.”

Kimmie was a short but solidly built woman with a gray crewcut. She grinned at Rob. “We’re gonna have fun, mister.”

Rob grinned back. “Absolutely.”

“Aaron, you’re with Angie. Pete, you’re with Gretchen. Jamie, you’re with Breanna. Ryan, you’re with Bella. Brad, you’re with Summer. Kevin, you’re with Janie. Kristen, you’re with Cobie.”

Cobie was probably in her late thirties, with green hair in a pixie cut. She moved to Kristen’s side and said, “We’re going to plant.”

“Oh, good. Better than hauling rocks.”

Cobie nodded. “Exactly. We got the best job.”

Ali continued. “Shanelle, Sophia, Drew and I will be filling wheelbarrows for y’all. Any questions?”

Pete, Jamie, Aaron, and Kristen all said, “Nope.”

“All right. Let’s get started.”

The teams scattered after conferring with the schematics. Cobie handed Kristen a shovel then led her to the far side of the property. “The plants are already placed where they go, so all we have to do is dig the hole and plant it. We’ll drag the hose after us to give them a good watering once they’re in the ground.”

“Sounds good.” Kristen frowned at the small tree in front of her. “What is this?”

“Crape myrtle. Highly drought- and heat-tolerant. The homeowners demanded that as many of the plants as possible be flowering, so most of what we’re planting today are crape myrtles, flowering cacti, and several varieties of sedum and sage.”

Kristen smiled. “Sounds like what I have in my yard.”

Cobie smiled back. “Very wise.”

Kristen tugged her gloves on. “Let’s get started.”

By mid-day, Cobie and Kristen had planted nearly a third of the property. Ryan, Brad, and their planting partners had nearly completed the other two-thirds. They broke for lunch – Ali ordered subs from a nearby deli – then went to finish the job. 

Kristen and Cobie had taken turns digging. They were working in the lower corner of the front yard, close to the street, where a privacy hedge lined the fence surrounding the property and a couple of trees in the next-door neighbor’s yard provided shade. 

It was Kristen’s turn to dig. Since the crape myrtles already had well-established root balls, the hole needed to be about two feet deep. Kristen was nearly there when her shovel struck something that made an odd clunk sound. She stopped. “What was that?”

Steve Snodgrass, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cobie frowned. “I don’t know. Didn’t sound like a rock.”

“Could it be a sprinkler line?”

“No. We tore those out.”

Kristen knelt and brushed soil away from what she’d struck. It was off-white and slightly rounded. Cobie knelt on the other side of the hole. “What is that?”

Kristen was afraid she knew exactly what it was. She flicked away a couple more handfuls of soil to reveal the answer to Cobie’s question.

Cobie fell back on her butt at the sight of the eye sockets. “Fucking hell! Is that a skull?”

“Sure looks like it.” Kristen stood up. She didn’t see Kevin or Rob anywhere – they were probably working in the backyard – but the third ex-cop on the scene, Pete, was up by the house, accepting a wheelbarrow full of stones from Drew. She hollered, “Pete!”

He looked around then saw her waving. He said something to Drew then trotted down the hill to her. “What’s wrong?”

Cobie had scrambled to her feet and had backed up until she was about five yards away from the hole. Kristen pointed. “We have a problem.”

“Oh, shit.” Pete knelt by the hole. “Were you using your glove to brush the dirt?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me have it. We need to make sure it’s human.” Pete took her right glove and finished uncovering the face of the skull.

It was definitely human. Pete stood up with a sigh. “Cobie, please go tell Ali to have everyone stop what they’re doing and stay put.” He pulled out his phone and dialed 911.

Here it is! The preorder should be ready everywhere by Friday, but I’ll let you know for sure when that happens.

LAPD detective Jon Eckhoff is jolted awake in the wee hours by a call from his union rep. A video is circulating on social media that supposedly shows Jon shooting a young man to death in a mostly-deserted warehouse. 

Jon has never shot anyone, in the line of duty or otherwise. To anyone who knows him, the video is clearly a deepfake. But who would do such a thing? Jon doesn’t have any enemies.

Or does he?

Jon is suspended for the duration of the investigation. He can’t do anything to help himself – but his friends at Angeles Investigations aren’t content to wait for Internal Affairs to clear Jon. Rob, Kevin, Jamilah, Jamie, and Ryan all jump in to solve the mystery. Who’s the victim? Where’s the crime scene? Who would spend the considerable time and money to create the video?

And, most importantly, why?

Angeles Investigations #3