Bone Blind
Only the flame from a curious candleholder illuminated the murdered corpse of Karl Knock on a bitterly cold Massachusetts night twenty years in the past. When the efforts of local, state and federal investigators failed to cast more light on the crime than the little candle did, the case gathered dust, unsolved and forgotten.
But when horror novelist Finn Ryan gets an invitation to dinner from a beautiful but eccentric and reclusive colleague, Tally Serzak, a web of danger sends its first, tentative filaments from that candlelit room. And nothing will ever be the same.
Because Finn has secrets. So does Tally. And so does Newton, MA, Police Detective Warren Yost, who found Knock’s body on that cold morning so long ago. Now, on the eve of retirement, Yost decides to solve the old murder and go out with a last hurrah.
As Finn’s involvement with the strange Tally reaches an intensity that has him running into walls, he begins to see similarities between himself and his own characters. He’s in a horror novel, except this one is real. There are no ghosts, no zombies or vampires. There is only Tally and an unfolding story Finn doesn’t want to see, but can’t ignore. As she knew he wouldn’t.
Warren Yost sees the story as well, but can’t assemble its puzzle until Finn provides a last piece that will lead to a final, and deadly, resolution.
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The Paper Doll Museum
By award-winning mystery author Abigail Padgett, The Paper Doll Museum stretches mystery one step further – into that spooky and sometimes hilarious world you always suspected was possible. Retired, divorced and addicted to eggplant, Taylor Blake is seeing things. That aren’t there. Determined to forestall the inevitable trip to a locked facility, she skillfully hides the fact that her life has become a B horror movie. But at a club dance, an octogenarian stalker in a cowboy costume leaves her an invitation to… The Paper Doll Museum.
There Taylor’s worst fears are subsumed in an exciting new reality. She learns that she isn’t crazy. She’s a Revenant, one of a new and curiously gifted group of people who have survived middle age only to regain the magical perceptions of childhood. But the magic is accompanied by a reappearance of childhood’s dark side as well, a ghoul now possessed of mature and horrific power. There really is something terrible hiding in the dark. There always was. Fortunately, Taylor Blake can kick ass!
It’s a good thing, because ancient tales, now unleashed, threaten the very scaffolding of human life. Only Revenants can see the threat. And only Revenants can fight it. Assuming they get their act together before it’s too late.
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An Unremembered Grave
Danni Telfer, abandoned as a toddler, has no idea what the fading tattoo of a white rose on her left shoulder means. Nor does she want to remember the peculiar perceptions that disturbed her childhood. A talented historian, Danni’s focus is on the Louisiana research project she hopes will land her a job that doesn’t involve teaching bored college freshmen. But she’s walking into a confluence of events that will change her life forever.
His story preserved only in a threadbare quilt fashioned by a slave during the Civil War, the Vampire Grimaud has slept for a century and a half beneath the soil of a Louisiana plantation called Angola. The place is now a prison of over six thousand men locked in sweltering isolation. One of these, Antoine Dupre, is innocent of the decade-old murder for which he is imprisoned. Yet now he must kill or be killed, unless, impossibly, he can prove his innocence.
When a prisoner crew back-hoeing the warden’s latest project, a golf course, unearths the vampire’s grave, Stéphane Grimaud wakes to a future beyond his imagination. Without help he will be vulnerable. How fortunate that an adept, a mortal gifted with the ability to see beings who exist in shadows, is nearby. Yet how strange that she fears him!
These three – historian, prisoner and vampire – have only a moment in time in which to alter a future already written. And the cost to each will be immeasurable.
Mandy Dru Mysteries
Five short stories introducing Mandy Dru, whose mom really wanted to name her Nancy. Lawyer dad, concerned about copyright infringement, urged a different name for the daughter now on her way to becoming a savvy San Diego criminal investigator.
Mandy’s adventures begin with a beach gift shop and a stolen brooch her ex-fiancée can’t pronounce, and quickly expand to include a threatened dance studio, a mysterious desert grave, the secret treasure hidden in a junk store and the strange intruder invading a million-dollar house overlooking a canyon. And a new boyfriend whose job as an FBI agent keeps him 150 miles away in Los Angeles. Mandy has her hands full driving up and down I-5 and solving mysteries, but like her quasi-namesake, Nancy Drew, she’s loving every minute!
A Kiss at Morgan’s Bay
Pilot novella in the Morgan’s Bay romantic suspense series, A Kiss at Morgan’s Bay introduces Darcy Flannigan, who is not looking for love. In fact, Darcy’s fleeing the man she thought she wanted to marry. Until a revelatory phone call from a hooker named Champagne told her what a rotten idea that would be. Darcy plans to hide out with an ancient relative she barely knows in the sleepy little California beach village of Morgan’s Bay until she can get her life in order. Trouble is following her, and she has no time for feelings aroused by a blue-eyed ex-Marine named Sal Hannan who happens to share her table at a freeway restaurant. The timing is SO wrong! But fate couldn’t care less about timing.
ebook editions: Kindle
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A Secret at Morgan’s Bay
Second in the Morgan’s Bay romantic suspense series, full-length novel, A Secret at Morgan’s Bay, continues Darcy Flannigan’s determined attempts to become the woman she wants to be. Her struggle is threatened by her out-of-control passion for ex-Marine Sal Hannan despite his complicated history, plus the fact that she doesn’t quite know who she is. Significant others in Morgan’s Bay do know, however, as does a stranger who shares her bent nose and secretly plans to kill her. Only a prescient parrot named Santo warns of the looming danger, but even he couldn’t predict what would happen to Darcy as she and Sal clash in a fight for the love neither yet really understands.
Blue McCarron has a Ph.D. in social psychology. She teaches and writes while living reclusively in an abandoned motel in the middle of the California desert with her Doberman, Bronte. A minister’s kid, she has an imprisoned felon for a twin and a broken heart from grieving over her lost lover, Misha. When a body is found trussed up in a public freezer and widow Muffin Crandall claims she killed an intruder in self-defense and then did some dumb things, including freezing the corpse for five years, Muffin’s brother Dan hires Blue to free his much older sister by analyzing her. It is apparent to Blue and forensic psychiatrist Rox that Muffin’s story is a hoax. But who is Muffin protecting? Who wants her dead? And, maybe more important, will Blue ever resolve her love for Misha and love again?
Complete with commentary by a Rastafarian Greek chorus in the form of ex-felon BB the Punk, the witty, suspenseful lesbian-detective thriller is hard to resist.
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Last Blue Plate Special (A Blue McClarron Mystery Book 2)
When two prominent female politicians die in San Diego of cerebral hemorrhages within days of each other, social psychologist Blue McCarron knows that their deaths are a statistical impossibility—they simply cannot be from natural causes. Within hours, a female evangelist almost dies, and threats from a religious fanatic, illustrated with blue willow plates, tie the three victims together. Blue and her lover, Roxanne, a criminal psychiatrist, are hired by the police as consultants and trace the three women to a posh plastic surgery clinic. As Blue and Rox investigate the clinic, the killer turns his attention on Blue, a strong, nontraditional woman who offends his ultraconservative religious beliefs. When Blue finds a blue willow plate on the doorstep of her isolated desert home, she knows the hunt has become a deadly game and that the unknown killer has every advantage.
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abigail padgett 
I loved Taylor Bradley I am hoping for a sequel. Any plans?
Working on a new Bo Bradley!
Speaking of sequels, any hope for Blue? When last I heard she was bordering on a new existence: one filled with other people.
Doubt that there will be another Blue, but you never know…
Dear Abigail, after nearly two decades went by since I first read your Bo Badley books I sort of rediscovered them, and was delighted to find, in addition, the Blue – mysteries. How would Blue manage in Philadelphia? 😉
I am looking forward to reading your blog, and will certainly enjoy your other books enourmously, will keep them till me next holiday at the sea, soon coming. Take care, kond regards from Germany, Beate
Thanks so much, Beate. Blue hanging out at the Mutter and munching Philly cheese steaks? And the traffic! Somehow it doesn’t quite work, does it? The thing about fiction is that it allows for the suspension of a pivotal moment, forever. Blue in her desert sanctuary thinking she’ll move to Philadelphia with Roxie, but frozen atop an arc from which the winds of change can ruffle her hair, but cannot move her, ever.
I envy your base in Germany. Well, maybe not the omnipresent diet of wurst, but definitely everything else, especially the Harz region. Note the “publisher” forAn Unremembered Grave – Brocken Press. Loved it there and dream of going back some day.
New Bo tale, The Stork Boy, in progress is set in a village in the French massif, but it would be fun to set one in Germany if I ever get back!
Abbie
Hi Abigail
I read many years ago your mysteries with Bo Bradley and, regarding that I am quite lazy, I was sad that only these books from you were translated in French. Recently the sadness was stronger than the laziness, and I struggled to obtain some others : so I could get the Blue mysteries and also the Paper Doll.
I discovered that the reading of a novel is quite different than the reading of a scientific paper, in which all major terms are in French. This reading was requesting the use of a dictionary for all the words of common life (so I read two books in place of one). I am still bored with my memory who disagree to impress these words, and needs the continuous use of this second book.
This necessitated that I read your books several times for the understanding, which is different than read them again for the pleasure, like I did before with your Bo Bradley mysteries.
Diving this way in your books in English was something else. So I decided to leave a message in your blog, even if I am uncomfortable with this public way of communication.
Abigail, I want to say to you that, outside of the scenario and the plot of your stories, I feel your characters deep. Regarding this, I agree and enjoy with the sight of life you show in your stories, that I feel deep and in tune with me.
I want to thank you for that.
Coming back from a movie, so superb and fantastically played, I feel that the characters were flat, because they were only beautiful illustrations of some emotions.
The evidence of this difference was suddenly appearing to me, and I knew how to write to you.
Furthermore, I like how you speak about music and dance, although maybe we do not share the same musical tastes. I am the Nameless Belgian Guitarist (certified as such in a review, I am very proud of this) and I play often for dancers. So it’s great for me to find people in resonance with the way which music operates in ourselves.
Best regards from Belgium
m
Hi, Michel, The Nameless Belgian Guitarist –
Thank you for your wonderful letter reifying, I think, the inchoate something underlying every form of communication – the wish/need/intent to be, if only momentarily, not alone. Music, art, writing, dance, all driven by some brave hunger to place part of oneself blindly into a conceptual universe in which someone, somewhere, sometime, might actually “get it,” get the core view that lies outside or beneath the framework, the view on which the whole structure rests. How kind of you to write and tell an author so eloquently that it worked!
Popular fiction is generally regarded as mere entertainment, but it’s often also a window into the author’s culture, zeitgeist and mind, if read as carefully as you read. I understand the difficulty in reading a foreign language, even one in which you are obviously fluent, and appreciate your dedication to the task. I am not fluent in French as you are in English, but like you I “read” several books on Basque history and culture with a French/English dictionary out of sheer fascination, only later incorporating much of what I learned in An Unremembered Grave.
And music? Ah, the ancient, perhaps only base for of communication, operating across species through areas of the brain totally unrelated to language. In an ideal world there would be a “religion” based entirely and exclusively on music, don’t you think? Perhaps you’ve read Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia. A bit too autobiographical, compared to his other work, but interesting nonetheless.
I was in Brussels in January, wished for more time in Belgium, about which I know too little.
Thank you so much for writing, Michel –
Abbie
I found you on a dna relative list. Now I have to read all your books! I had better get started.
Wow. My cousin Ruth Ann (Tolson) married a guy named Bob Burnett, so maybe you’re related to them? Hope you enjoy my books!
Hello,
I just read An Unremembered Grave. What happens to Danni Telfer? Does she find her family? Why was she separated from them? Is she somehow related to Antoine or are they simply hyper aware, because he is also an Adept? Do you intend to write a sequel? There are so
many unanswered questions!
Hi, Foster Mom –
First, how wonderful that you’re training to foster! And yes, I keep meaning to write a sequel to AUG where yes, Danni does learn the secrets behind her strange childhood, particularly who her mother is. She and Grimaud will meet again.
I look forward to reading the sequel! Thanks.