Livia J. Washburn

FOR WHOM THE FUNERAL BELL TOLLS (Fourth Literary Tour Mystery) 

(Fourth Literary Tour Mystery) 
February 29, 2012 by The Book Place 
Trade Paperback/EBook

Delilah takes a tour group to Key West, Florida, to visit the house where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote during the Thirties, along with all the tropical attractions that Key West has to offer.  Key West is a funky but beautiful place, of course, but then death intrudes when one of the tourists appears to commit suicide by killing himself with a shotgun in what seems to be an attempt to recreate Hemingway’s suicide.  Naturally, though, the “suicide” turns out to be murder, and once more Delilah finds herself trying to find a killer. Nazi spies?  U-boats run aground onCaribbean islands?  Buried treasure?  Modern-day pirates and drug smugglers?  Delilah will have her hands full sorting out this one!

KILLER ON A HOT TIN ROOF (Third Literary Tour Mystery) 

November 30, 2010 by Kensington 
Hardcover 304 pages 
Isbn: 0758225709    
(Isbn13: 9780758225702)

Because of her friendship with Professor Will Burke, Delilah becomes involved with arranging a tour for people who want to attend the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival held every year in New Orleans.  She figures that a group of English professors and their spouses will be a low-key, intelligent, and, well, professorial bunch.  Unlike some of her trouble-plagued tours, she expects this one to go smoothly.

Which, of course, she realizes later, is a sure-fire way to jinx things.

HUCKLEBERRY FINISHED (Second Literary Tour Mystery) 

Kensington (Hardback) 
October 27, 2009 
ISBN- 978-0758225689 
Mass Market Paperback 
Nov. 2010

Set aboard a Mark Twain-themed cruise on the not-so-peaceful Mississippi, Washburn's snappy second mystery to feature literary travel agent Delilah Dickinson (after 2008's Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead) shows how much mischief a tour group can get into while confined to a moving paddle wheeler. When one of Delilah's charges, Ben Webster, causes a scene in the casino, the captain calls Delilah on the carpet. Ben later vanishes only to reappear as a corpse. Meanwhile, a charming onboard Mark Twain impersonator, Mark Lansing, takes a shine to Delilah, but turns out to have more than one identity to hide. And Mark isn't alone in harboring secrets, as one teary-eyed tour group member confides that a riverboat employee was murdered precisely one year earlier on the same tract of waterway. Delilah saves more than the day as Washburn smoothly infuses this cozy with hints of romance and humor as well as glimpses of Twain sights in today's Hannibal, Mo (Publishers Weekly Nov. 2009)

FRANKLY MY DEAR, I'M DEAD (First Literary Tour Mystery) 

Kensington (Hardback)
October 28, 2008
ISBN-10: 0758225660 
ISBN-13: 978-0758225665
Mass Market Paperback 
October 6, 2009 

No one is surprised when feisty Delilah Dickinson opens her own literary travel agency in Atlanta after her divorce. But during her first group's tour of an old plantation modeled after Tara from Gone With the Wind, she finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery-and everyone knows death is not so good for business. So, with God as her witness, Delilah vows to find the killer.

With all the drama of Margaret Mitchell's epic story suddenly coming to alarming life, Delilah's only chance to head off a not-so-Civil War is to track down and confront the deranged murderer. But she must move quickly and very quietly, or risk becoming the next victim of a killer-who frankly doesn't give a damn.