The Scientist, the Psychic, and the Nut
Beth Armstrong a bio-medical research scientist learns her dying aunt, Kathleen, is really her mother. Now Beth insists on discovering the identity of her father. At Kathleen’s funeral a mysterious woman in black appears near the graveside, playing jazz on a saxophone. Beth decides the woman must be connected to her ex-flapper mother’s Roaring Twenties past. Long ago the ex-flapper, Kathleen, had lived in the Caribbean and danced on the white beaches of St. John with her one true love. When alive, Kathleen nagged Beth to take husband Harold to these romantic islands so Beth and Harold could repair their failing marriage.
Beth books the vacation, but Harold believes she’s only on a quest to learn about her father. She assures Harold they will recapture their lost passion, and this will become the trip of their dreams.
From the start their island adventure is doomed. After being accosted and rob by a thug, Beth meets an old woman who knows more than she tells, while a young girl, whose mother has disappeared, enchants Beth, causing Beth to question the nature of science. However a gang of barefoot boys on an old boat fire up some toxic trouble. When Beth and Harold’s diving adventure turns deadly, she knows her marriage is lost along with the identity of her father unless she convinces Harold of her devotion and stops the murderer before their dream vacation becomes a lethal nightmare.
About Charlene Bell Dietz (Corrales, New Mexico Author)
Charlene Dietz, after retiring as an Albuquerque Public School educator and instructor for the College of Santa Fe, traveled the United States as an educational consultant for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. As a volunteer, she’s excavated dinosaurs, prepared fossils for exhibits, catalogued prehistoric life for the NM Museum of Natural History & Science, and served as a community lay person for over twenty-five years at the Sandia Federal Laboratories’ Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.
She now enjoys the peacefulness of living in the central mountains of New Mexico surrounded by wildlife where she can connect with her writing and artistic muses. Her espionage-family saga novel, The Flapper, the Scientist, and the Saboteur won the 2016 NM-AZ First Book Award, was a Finalist for the 2017 International Book Awards, and received a Kirkus starred review. “Readers will initially settle in for a standard mystery…this story becomes much more complicated than a simple whodunit—it delightfully turns into serious literature.”
Her second book, The Flapper, the Impostor, and the Stalker, is a stand-alone Roaring-Twenties historical mystery, revealing the young adult life of the ex-flapper of the first book and was released in late fall 2017.
