Bestseller and multiple award–winning author Linda Barnes returns with the most personal case to date for her popular Boston PI, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta, in unfamiliar territory working on her own behalf, finds herself in the middle of a complicated case that has as much to do with the people she loves as the backstreets of Boston, and beyond.
For starters, Carlotta wants to know what her on-again, off-again boyfriend Sam Gianelli did to earn himself a secret indictment for murder that’s keeping him out of the country. A man with plenty of secrets, he won’t tell her anything, much less let her help, and she isn’t having any more luck with her old friends at the Boston PD. Sam’s exile could be connected to the mob—he is in the family—but she’s not buying it. It couldn’t be that simple. Nothing involving Sam ever is.
Faced with nothing but dead ends, Carlotta goes back to basics and takes a case for a nervous bride-to-be who wants to make sure her fiancé is being faithful. Simple enough, but when her client turns up dead, Carlotta catches the kind of break she wished she hadn’t.
While nothing is as it seems in Lie Down with the Devil, one thing is clear: Readers know that when they’re reading Linda Barnes, they’re in the hands of a maestro.
I was born in Detroit; I always say that's where I learned about crime, but I mean no disrespect to a great city. It's also where I learned to love Motown music and do the Stroll. Came to Boston to go to college, and like so many, stayed, awed by the Atlantic Ocean and accessible public transportation. I still love walking Boston's cobbled streets, riding the T, breathing the history.
I started writing while teaching high school theater. Required by my principal to enter a one-act play festival sponsored by the Boston Globe, I cast the play before I actually found it. I had such great students that year, and 12 of them certainly deserved to be in the festival cast. When I couldn't find a one-act with 12 roles (duh), I had to write one myself. The festival was a competition, and darned if we didn't keep on winning, right up to the state finals, where a man came up to me and asked whether he might publish that play. I said yes, wrote more plays, and then segued into crime fiction.
My first Carlotta Carlyle short story was nominated for just about every mystery award going, and the first Carlyle novel, A TROUBLE OF FOOLS, was nominated for an Edgar and a Shamus, and won the American Mystery Award. I've got a new book, the eleventh in the Carlyle series, coming out in May. It's called HEART OF THE WORLD. Check my website for upcoming tour details. For the rest, I'm married, mother of a teenage son, and currently proud to be president of Private Eye Writers of America.
