The First Seville Travel Mystery

Marc and Megan Seville were hoping for a nice relaxing trip to Kauai, but when their Hawaiian friend Richard Trotter, owner of the island-based Triple T cattle ranch is killed under suspicious circumstances, they refuse to accept his death as merely accidental. There are too many people who wanted to see Trotter dead, his ranch shut down, and his valuable property sold off to the highest bidder. The Sevilles use all the skills and smarts at their disposal to investigate while new crimes pile up in someone’s attempt to cover their tracks in the first murder. These plucky sleuths even find themselves in personal jeopardy as they struggle to untangle the wicked web of deception that lies beneath this island paradise.

In this series, the appeal of each novel should be three-fold. You hang out with a fun couple, enjoying the witty banter and the wild adventures of an updated Nick and Nora or Tommy and Tuppence. You enjoy vicarious travel – to Hawaii, to Mexico, to Italy, and so on. Plus, you get the joy of playing along to solve a traditional Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh puzzle-type mystery, complete with colorful suspects, clues hidden in a jumble of red herrings, and a satisfying solution arrived at through discoveries and deduction. While not cozies, these mysteries will feature many elements of classic, golden-age detective stories – maps, lists of characters, reproduced letters and articles, etc. These books will delight fans of Louise Penny, Cara Black, and Sue Grafton.

This completed 85K-word novel is currently seeking an agent and/or a publisher.

Chuck Caruso welcomes correspondence from interested parties via email: chuckcarusophd@gmail.com