Gerrie Ferris Finger

It's 1921. Cleo Snow travels with her cousin, Neill Connolly, to Sago Island, Ga. to lessen the sadness of her fiance's death in The Great War (later called World War I). He'd been missing, presumed killed in France, and his body recently returned home.America's victory celebration is in full swing. The Flapper Era has begun. Cleo is poised between her Victorian raising and post-war liberal ideas. Women got the vote in 1920. They work - Cleo's a nurse. Hemlines are rising. Jargon is spicier. Songs are racier. The fox trot is the cat's meow. Everyone smokes coffin nails. The great experiment, Prohibition, has ushered in an era of fascinating gangsters and illegal speakeasies. Drinking and dancing go together like bathtub gin and painted dolls. On Sago Island Cleo meets fly-boy hero Graham Henry, the dazzling son of a steel magnate. They fall in love dancing to "Whispering," the rage song of the year. Complicating their love-at-first-sight is Shafer and Josie Drake. Shafer is Graham's cousin. He lost his liquor business and is about to lose his money-loving wife, Josie.The morning after the dance, Josie is missing. A note she purportedly wrote says she's leaving the island to get a divorce and marry Graham. Graham swears the note's a lie and that he and Josie were nothing more than friends.Where did Josie go and when? Did she return to New York where she danced in the Ziegfeld Follies? No one saw her leave the island. But Cleo knows Graham had nothing to do with her disappearance because Cleo was with him in the lighthouse the night she vanished, the night Cleo made love with Graham. Cleo vows she will never confess to making love with a man she's known only two days. But Will Graham compromise Cleo to clear himself?Island resident, the enigmatic Doc Holliday, who claims to be related to the infamous gunslinger, is a veterinarian and a falconer. His falcon, Billy, captures Cleo's severely crushed heart. Cleo captures Doc's heart, but she's reeling over her gullibility and her body's occasional betrayal of her resolve. Will he win her with his darkly sensuous charm? Everyone on Sago, it seems, has something to hide, even villagers who concoct their own hooch - and it all pivots around Josie and Graham. With her determination firmed by deceit, Cleo vows to uncover the truth.

Moriah Dru's weekend with her lover, Lieutenant Richard Lake, is interrupted when two sisters go missing after their foster parents' house burns down. An ex-cop, Dru established Child Trace, Inc., after leaving the force. Together, they have a reputation for solving cases.Once they investigate, they learn of other missing children from the same area. A snitch tells them a secret sex organization, with members named after chess pieces, is bound for Costa Rica with two girls. The chase is on to stop the kidnappers before they escape the country.The End Game features a strong heroine in a vivid Southern setting. Gerrie Ferris Finger puts a new spin on the classic mystery novel in the first installment of the Moriah Dru/Richard Lake series, winner of the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition.

A GLORIOUS CURSESequel to best-selling THE GHOST SHIPThought transference can be a curse. Especially when what you learn from a murderer's mind could get you killed..An unpopular archeologist is murdered at his dig in the dead of night. The killer's narcissistic mind cloaks the cowardly crime. Now Ann Gavrion must use worldly methods to unmask the murderer.

Richard Lake of the Atlanta Police Department gets a cold case when a witness regains his memory. Lake recruits Moriah Dru to look into the murder of Juliet Trapp' sixteen when she died' and a student at Winters Farm Academy.Juliet Trapp told her mother she was going to Bike Week with Wild Blood' an outlaw motorcycle gang' over the Christmas break. The case roars into high gear when Juliet's father' Sherman Trapp' is murdered in Chattanooga - where the predominant motorcycle club is Wild Blood.Now Dru picks up the trail of the man who killed Trapp's daughter. But could Juliet actually be alive, after all?

Murder and deceit are not strangers to glamorous Palm Springs - or to Atlanta ... During a fierce custody battle, recovering addict Eileen Cameron and her daughter Kinley Whitney vanish into the night. The estranged husband, Bradley Whitney, insists Eileen has taken their daughter to hide with the Indians in the desert. Moriah Dru of Child Trace is hired to locate the girl and her home - but Dru is wary of the husband's claims. Working with her lover, police Lieutenant Richard Lake, they delve into Bradley's past, and find themselves also investigating the Atlanta Suburban Girl murders. Is there a connection between the two seemingly unrelated cases?

A Moriah Dru / Richard Lake mysteryThe seventh in the Dru/Lake series begins when Atlanta's famous police dog, Buddy, is stolen from his handler's SUV. The community howls in anguish over the canine's disappearance, and soon A.P.D. Lieutenant Richard Lake is on the hunt with his lover, P.I. Moriah Dru.The trail leads to an investment scam, dubbed The Wolves of Atlanta, and a mega-church's finances. As they dig deeper, the bodies begin piling up, reminding them of the old adage, "Let sleeping dogs lie."