CURATORS OF CRIME – Holiday Sketches

This is the first collection of mystery short stories, with a holiday theme, by the Curators of Crime—Connie Berry, M. A. Monnin, Lane Stone and Nina Wachsman. We all write mysteries involving the fascinating and sometimes nefarious world of art, antiques, and antiquities. The gems in this collection feature major and minor characters from our books:

• “Lady Barbara’s Christmas Miracle,” features characters from the Kate Hamilton mysteries by Connie Berry, such as The Shadow of Memory and Mistletoe and Murder.
• “The Glamour Girls Strike Out” follows Rita and Lauren, from Death on the Aegean in M. A. Monnin’s Intrepid Traveler mysteries, as they encounter the criminal element on their holiday in Venice.
• In “Art and Enemies”, the title sums up the behind-the-scenes intrigue of the art world in The Big Picture mysteries of Lane Stone, featuring another employee of SIRA.
• “The Right Spin” is set in seventeenth-century Venice, where the elite courtesan Belladonna, from Nina Wachsman’s Venice Beauties series, must once again rely on her wits to defend herself from powerful men, as she did in The Courtesan’s Secret.

With these mini-mysteries, the reader gets a sampler of the art mysteries written, enjoyed and collected by the Curators of Crime.