Fowler's Folly — Olivia Stowe

The tenth book in the Charlotte Diamond mystery series takes retired FBI agent Charlotte Diamond, and her spouse, movie star Brenda Brandon/Boynton, to an aging mountaintop palace in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their late summer foursome vacation plans to bask on Hilton Head Island with Charlotte's brother, Williamsburg physician Chance Diamond, and his Methodist minister wife, Marilyn, are scotched by an approaching hurricane. And Charlotte becomes embroiled in the reopening of the drug distribution operation she encountered in the last book in the series, Follow the Palm. Before plans can be made on a substitute vacation, an unwelcome college mate of Charlotte and Marilyn's, Regina Fowler, stumbles in to beg Charlotte to come up to the ancestral home, Fowler's Folly, she owns with two cousins, to stop a drug operation, dramatically dropping a cocaine packet with the same logo on it as in the case Charlotte thought had just been solved.

Once arriving at Fowler's Folly and stuck there because the hurricane they were avoiding in Hilton Head veered to the Blue Ridge Mountains instead, Charlotte and family are guided by a clairvoyant into uncovering multiple mysteries.

In a bonus short story, Blessedly Cursed Christmas, set the following Christmas season at Curtain Call, the movie colony retirement community Brenda and Charlotte are developing on the riverbank of Maryland's Choptank River, the couple finds they are battling Mother Nature again -- this time in the form of a relentless snowfall.

Motivated by the need to encourage residents to have the will to live through a season that is as challenging as joyful for the elderly and lonely and also by the wish to integrate the retirement home into the village better, Brenda and Charlotte decide to bring in best friends and favorite relatives for each resident for a surprise Christmas Eve party. The plans are heartfelt, but they also are ambitious, and the weather has plans that challenge them at every step.

Will Curtain Call get its Christmas miracle?