Sarah Shankman

Writing as Alice Storey, Shankman first introduced Atlanta journalist/detective Samantha Adams in this critically acclaimed mystery. When a distinguished attorney is found murdered, Sam delves into a scandal of dirty money and adultry that stretches from Atlanta's society salons to the saloons of the good old boys.

First Kill All the Lawyers

“The action is non-stop and full of surprises” in this “entertaining mystery” when a spa weekend in Hot Springs, Arkansas, is marred with murder (Publishers Weekly). Leaving a bad boyfriend behind in New Orleans, crime reporter and amateur sleuth Samantha Adams heads to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to celebrate the engagement of her old friend Jinx Watson, who also just won the Texas lottery. Sam is hoping a girls’ weekend of posh spa treatments will help wash her ex out of her hair, but Jinx’s run of good luck comes up short when her friend Olivia is a no-show—and her fiancé, Speed McKay, disappears. A former call girl, Olivia now lives an upstanding life as a local diner owner. But could her disappearance have something to do with her son’s recent arrest? As for Speed, the more Sam looks into his life, the less he seems to be who he claims. And when Sam and Jinx realize they’re up against a kidnapper demanding a million-dollar ransom, Sam’s weekend away from her relationship problems might put her in the arms of a killer. “A high, wide, and handsome romp—occasionally tinged by melancholy—through a regional subculture brought to vivid life by an author who dares more and gets better with each outing.” —Kirkus Reviews

He Was Her Man

Alice Storey

When successful journalist Samantha Adams comes home to Atlanta, life isn't all mint juleps and shady verandahs. Instead, there is a corrupt sheriff practicing a nasty kind of politics. Soon Samantha begins investigating a scandal of corruption, dirty money and adultery that could cost her her life.

Things get weirder than a peanut butter and banana sandwich when crime reporter Samantha Adams visits Elvis’s birthplace in this Southern mystery. Crime reporter Samantha Adams is working on a book called American Weird when her boyfriend, Harry, invites her to a barbecue cookoff in Tupelo, Mississippi. It’s hard to turn down a drive to Elvis’s birthplace in a genuine pink Cadillac. And as Harry points out, the King’s birthplace “ought to be lousy with weird.” As they soon discover, lousy is right—and weird is just the beginning. Also visiting Tupelo is Mary Ann McClanahan. After killing her worthless husband, Carlin, she discovered he was already married to a woman in Tupelo who’ll collect his life insurance—unless she does something about it. Meanwhile, the cookoff heats up when a contestant is zapped by his own electric smoker, and Samantha’s dog has to be rescued by a Biker for Jesus at the Elvis Memorial McDonald’s. But when Lovie Rakestraw, one of Elvis’s junior high classmates, is found electrocuted in her whirlpool, Sam is on the killer’s trail like a hound dog.

The King Is Dead

The fourth suspenseful mystery starring ace crime reporter Sam Adams--from the author of First Kill All the Lawyers. Sam has just turned 40, and the last thing she wants to do is cover the Miss America Pageant. But in Atlantic City Sam discovers what's beautiful and what's deadly when an obnoxious pageant judge mysteriously disappears.

She Walks in Beauty

“Yes, ma’am,” “No, ma’am,” elbows off the table, and thank you notes, all examples of the good manners that Southern mothers drill into their young. But the characters in these mostly Southern stories by Sarah Shankman know the deeper meaning of the term. Good manners are words and actions that put others at ease; bad manners don’t. And bad manners, like bad children, must be punished. A bride left at the altar, as in “All You Need Is Love,” is entitled to be in a killer mood for years. And the wife in “Wish You Were Here,” both two-timed and targeted for murder by her fat doctor hubbie, can’t be blamed for taking matters into her own hands on a steamy July day. Two women, friends since childhood—who could fault the one for harboring a long-festering hate for the other’s damning betrayal in the collection’s title story? And three deadly tales set in New Orleans, where the silver is always kept both polished and sharpened, are perfect examples of novelist Rita Mae Brown’s quip: You can't be truly rude until you understand good manners. These dozen stories, collected here for the first time, will delight the legions of fans of Shankman’s Samantha Adams series who’ve long admired her wit, her colorful characters, her finely honed relish for revenge, and her winning ways with words. This daring daughter of the South reimagines Watergate’s Deep Throat, writes a recipe for poisoning a journalist who went one step too far, and devastatingly describes the misery of living beneath a noisy neighbor…and the deadly consequences that that ever-so-rude clomp, clomp, clomping so richly deserves.

12 Stories of Bad Manners and Criminal Consequences

Say You're Sorry

What’s a nice Southern Jewish girl like Emma Fine doing married to an angry but beautiful and incredibly sexy black artist like Jesse Tree? Emma Tree’s marriage is falling apart. Jesse’s obsession with Skytop, the old inn he’s renovating, pulls him further away from her, and the distance forces Emma into some uneasy questions about their relationship and about herself. She packs her bags and travels home to Louisiana, to a family she loves but barely knows. And the answers she finds along the way help solve the puzzles that have haunted her all her life. Before Emma’s mother Helen died, she made her husband Jake Fine promise to look after the baby should anything happen to Helen. After her death, Jake left his Baltimore home to travel to West Cypress, Louisiana, where a new wife was waiting. For Rosalie Norris, Emma was a dream come true. Emma is a right and precocious child, but by the time she’s a teenager, she has outgrown the old-fashioned provincialism of West Cypress and Rosalie’s stiflingly overprotective and obsessive love. While teaching in California, Emma meets and eventually marries Jesse Tree. Theirs is a passionate and loving relationship despite the vast differences between them. It’s a secret Emma must keep from her family, but it’s nothing compared to the secrets they’ve kept hidden from Emma all these years. Sarah Shankman has written a hauntingly touching and darkly funny novel about the long-time coming of age of a 30-year-old woman in search of the truth about who she is, where she comes from, and where she’s going. It’s a story about the secrets of the past and how they determine the future, and a love story about two people from completely different worlds who meet, fall in love, collide, and crash—sending off sparks that neither of them, nor the readers who come to love them, will ever forget. QUOTES “In Keeping Secrets Sarah Shankman has created a character as wise and wonderfully funny as Fear of Flying’s Isadora Wing. This is a brilliant book, beautifully written, which reinforces with a spellbinding story what I’ve always known about Southern women: Keep your eye on them. They’ll blindside you with their bravery and slamdunk your heart.” Pat Conroy The Prince of Tides “Holly Golightly, turn in your jersey. Here comes Emma Tree. Keeping Secrets is a wonderment, a subtle earthy, joyous, darkling journey through a bright country, in which a fragmented and most appealing Southern girl sets out to discover herself and finds a woman of enormous richness, complexity, and wholeness. In Impersonal Attractions, Sarah Shankman showed us she has a near-perfect ear and eye for the contemporary dilemma. In Keeping Secrets, she proves—magnificently—that she also has the heart for it.” Anne Rivers Siddons Heartbreak Hotel

Keeping Secrets

In her witty, southern-fried suspense novels, Sarah Shankman delivers nonstop action with a hilarious bite. Now she sends her acclaimed, irreverent heroine -- New Orleans writer Samantha Adams -- to a southwestern New Age hot spot, to unearth a secret past that was supposed to be six feet under. My dearest Sugar. I must see you. It's urgent. I need your help. The letter that arrived from Sam's mother was postmarked Santa Fe, penned in her mother's handwriting, and disclosed details only Johanna Adams could know. There was just one catch: Johanna Adams had been dead for thirty-four years. The mind-blowing missive could have been an entry from Sam's latest book of bizarre anecdotes, American Weird -- or an elaborate hoax. Either way, it instantly rekindled Sam's impossible wish that her mother hadn't really died in a plane crash when Sam was a child. Fueled by her journalistic instincts -- and a daughter's need for closure -- Sam touches down among Santa Fe's tourists and crystal gazers, jewelry shops and fast-food stands. But only when she summons the courage to knock on the door of Room 409 at the La Fonda Hotel does her surreal, mother-seeking adventure take off with no turning back.

Sarah Shankman

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