ETIQUETTE FOR LOVERS AND KILLERS

A 1960s woman longing for adventure gets drawn into a murder involving a glamorous redhead, old money Mainers, and the “Brooks Brothers handsome” man of her dreams.

Small town girl Billie McCadie has big dreams. A cultural linguist and Jane Austen fan with fantasies of working in a museum, marrying a “dreamy archeologist,” and living a life of “nerdy splendor,” Billie works as a seamstress in her hometown of Eastport, Maine. Everything changes the day she receives an envelope in her post office box with no name on it. Inside is a diamond engagement ring along with a passionate love letter addressed to someone named Gertrude, a woman she later learns is a high-society habitué. With sparkle, verve, and a fine eye for the details of the mid-1960s, author Healy follows Billie through darkening twists of fate that begin after she meets a man named Avery Webster. Scion of an old money Eastport family, Avery offers Billie glimpses into a glittering world of garden parties, yachts, and secrets that culminate in the brutal stabbing death of Gertrude Taylor. Unable to resist Avery or the mystery surrounding Gertrude and her murder, Billie begins her own private investigation. What she learns along the way—not just about the skeletons littering the closets of Eastport’s wealthiest citizens but also about her own less-than-decorous desires—transforms Billie’s humdrum, nowhere-going-fast life into one that is anything but ordinary. Replete with Emily Post–style epigraphs about etiquette, this hybrid mystery/romance hearkens back to Austen’s novels of refined drawing room intrigue while revealing, beneath smiles and witty banter, the underside of human nature.

A romantic suspense novel bubbling with wit and the ever-present thrill of danger.