Keyes Videoshop Mysteries Book 3
The Big Sleep(over)
An old woman is dead. Her will is a lie. And the wrong man is in jail.
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What is The Big Sleep(over) about?
It’s June 1987, and Sam Keyes is spending a quiet weekend dog-sitting at Dunleigh House with noir movie posters on every wall, a classic convertible in the garage, and Nora, an utterly chaotic wire fox terrier, curled up beside her on the couch. It should be the easiest gig of her summer. Then Edna Quincy, Lake Edwina’s last real grand dame and Sam’s favorite eccentric, drowns in her car on the way to the airport, and Sam finds herself packing her bags under the cold, proprietary eye of Edna’s son—a man already dividing up the estate before the body’s cold, and who wants the dog gone along with everything else. Sam nabs Nora and walks out the door.
What follows looks, at first, like the tragic accident everyone insists it is. But Edna’s will is contested within a single business day, her secret boyfriend swears the brakes were sabotaged, and a grieving VHS collector remembers the “good son” tinkering under the hood of a car he’s never known how to fix.
Sam pulls one thread too many, makes one very bad phone call, and watches the wrong man get arrested for a murder he didn’t commit—while the real killer cuts ribbons downtown and smiles for the camera. With Benji running down leads on the BBS, a stolen movie-theater seat in the back of a getaway Hornet, and a debt to pay before an innocent man goes to trial, Sam has to out-plot a man who’s already won every round in public.
In Lake Edwina, it turns out even a Sunday drive can be a scene from somebody else’s crime, and Sam Keyes is the only one who knows which movie she’s really watching.
Read an excerpt from The Big Sleep(over)
From Chapter 1
Her father’s Buick had barely cleared the end of the long driveway before Sam turned around and really looked at Dunleigh House for the first time in over a year.
It hadn’t changed. Of course it hadn’t, because the whole point of Dunleigh House was that it didn’t change. It was three stories of painted Victorian lady, the deep porch wrapped around two sides, the gingerbread trim painted in three colors: cream, sage green, and a dark burgundy that looked almost black in the late afternoon light. The early June heat had done wonders for the garden, with the honeysuckle climbing the porch posts extravagantly, almost aggressively, and the rose bushes surrounding the house erupting with well-tended blooms.
Sam picked up her overnight bag and the paper grocery sack she’d packed with three days’ worth of snack provisions plus the textbook for her Abnormal Psychology class she was a chapter behind on, then headed up the front steps.
The wide, heavy old walnut door opened before she reached it.
“You’re late,” Edna Quincy said, though her tone made it clear she didn’t actually care. She was a small woman, which always surprised Sam slightly, because Edna’s presence took up so much more space than her actual physical self. Her white hair was pinned up in an elegant chignon with the efficiency of someone who’d been doing it the same way for over forty years. Reading glasses were pushed up on her forehead, and she stood like she’d been told as a girl to stand up straight and had decided that was the last instruction she’d ever need.
“I’m four minutes late,” Sam said. “Dad hit every red light on Maple.”
“Your father has always had an unfortunate relationship with traffic patterns.” Edna held the door open with regal impatience. “Come in before the mosquitoes do.”