What Doesn't Kill You

A fast-paced prequel mystery featuring all the kick ass What Doesn't Kill You female sleuths. It's five years before Katie runs away to the islands, and this time her travels take her closer to home: back to her law school reunion. With Emily as her plus-one and Michele rounding out the party, their evening at a murder mystery dinner theater goes awry with weird former classmates, too many cocktails, and - oh yeah - a real murder onstage before the cast finishes Act One.

Katie Connell is a high-strung attorney whose sloppy drinking habits and stunted love life collide hilariously during a doomed celebrity case in Dallas. She flees Texas for the Caribbean and escapes professional humiliation, a broken heart, and a wicked Bloody Mary habit, but ends up trading one set of problems for another when she begins to investigate the suspicious deaths of her parents on the island of St. Marcos.

A family in danger. A missing love child. A deadly new strain of murder. These are the themes of the three books in the Michele Lopez Hanson Trilogy. It includes the three books: Going for Kona, Fighting for Anna, and Searching for Dime Box. Follow Michele as she solves one mystery after another, despite a personal tragedy and setbacks.

When her husband is killed in a hit-and-run bicycling accident, it takes all of Michele Lopez Hanson's strength not to burrow into their bed for the rest of her life. But their kids need her, and she promised herself she'd do the Kona Ironman Triathlon in Adrian's honor, and someone seems to be stalking her family, so she slogs through the pain to keep herself on track.

When a dead body swan-dives from a balcony into the pool at a wedding, gossip comes to a halt about disgraced paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily - whose husband left her for a woman who turns out to be a man. Enter Jack, a secretive attorney and sexy mix of cowboy and Indian. She refuses to work for him, until she learns about the disappearance of the six-year old daughter of his notorious client Sofia. Emily launches a desperate search for her.

When a dead body swan dives from a balcony into the pool at a wedding, gossip about disgraced paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily - whose husband left her for a woman who's really a man - comes to a halt. Enter Jack, a secretive attorney who is a sexy mix of cowboy and Indian. She refuses to work for him until she learns about the disappearance of the six-year-old daughter of his notorious client, Sofia, the wedding shooter, who is also an illegal immigrant. Emily feels a strange affinity for the girl and launches a desperate search for her.

Paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily only wants two little things. The first is to adopt Betsy - the girl who has stolen her heart but could be deported to Mexico at any time. The other is a second chance with her boss Jack, a smolderingly hot and mysterious criminal defense attorney in Amarillo who runs his family's horse ranch in New Mexico on the side.

Big-haired paralegal and former rodeo queen Emily has her life back on track. Her adoption of Betsy seems like a done deal, her parents have reunited, and she’s engaged to her sexy boss, Jack. Then client Phil Escalante’s childhood buddy Dennis drops dead, face-first into a penis cake at the adult novelty store Phil owns with his fiancée, Nadine, one of Emily’s best friends. The cops charge Phil with murder, right on the heels of his acquittal in a trial for burglarizing the Mighty is His Word church offices.

Michele retreats to the country while her teens are away for the summer, to write the memoirs of her elderly neighbor, Gidget - a reclusive former Houston art gallery owner - and learn how to be alone in the wake of her husband’s death. But when Gidget dies unexpectedly, she leaves everything to Michele except a bequest to a daughter no one knew existed. Suddenly, Michele's country quiet is shattered, and half of Texas shows up: some to help, some to contest the will, and others to make sure the mystery daughter is never found alive.

A musical career in the making. A murdered childhood friend. One chance to catch the killer. Ava dreams of building a better life for her daughter through her island pop songs. Her new temp job leads to a once-in-a-lifetime shot at a record deal, but before she can pack her bags for New York, she discovers a dead body outside her office building. Horrified, Ava recognizes the murdered sex worker as her childhood friend. The single mother finds herself torn between pursuing her life’s passion or justice for her murdered friend. 

After battling breast cancer, island pop singer and single mom Ava thought she could handle anything her concert tour threw her way. But when tragedy strikes her album launch party, she realizes she may have underestimated the price she’ll have to pay for fame. The cost skyrockets when someone attempts to murder her headlining act. Still shaken by the alarming attack, Ava has little time to process the traumatic event before she’s caught up in a scandal worthy of the tabloids. Someone in her staff is leaking secrets to the paparazzi.

Everyone wants a piece of Ava’s skyrocketing star power...including her serious boyfriend and her deadbeat baby daddy. But when she visits the future site of a controversial resort and stumbles upon a dead body, Ava thinks she’s finally found a worthy cause for her newfound celebrity. Determined to catch the killer and stop the construction of the eco-unfriendly tourist trap, she plans to put her sex symbol status to good use. 

After lonely months spent writing her true crime novel, Michele Lopez Hanson reconnects with her community by offering pro bono legal counsel. When an open-and-closed drug case takes an unexpected turn, she’s determined to shake off the rust and hit the books. But after a mysterious sickness sends her infant grandson to the hospital, she worries she may have bitten off more than she can chew. Searching for the source of his sickness, she discovers strange parallels between her legal case and the baby’s suspected poisoning. 

Every cowboy at the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo is hot for rising music star Maggie Killian. But Maggie is laser-focused on her songs, her next show, and her future. She’s not going to be any cowboy’s buckle bunny. Down-and-out bull-rider Hank Sibley needs big money fast, so he strikes a deal with the devil to lose in Cheyenne for cash. When Hank reneges to get Maggie to go out with him, the only thing standing between him and deadly payback is a pissed-off, buckle-wearing Maggie.

A hook-up turned lethal. A spurned, angry cowboy. Can rebel Maggie turn the tables before a killer adds her to the list of lost causes? Washed-up alt-country-rocker-turned-junker Maggie Killian is pulled to Wyoming by an irresistible force...former bull rider Hank Sibley, the man who broke her heart 15 years before. When she unexpectedly meets his Sunday school-teaching girlfriend at a saloon, Maggie seeks liquor-fueled oblivion between the sheets of a younger man’s bed.

Murder-by-fire. A catfishing squatter. Will Maggie get her life back before the killer claims the one thing she has left to lose? Junker and former alt-country rocker Maggie Killian tucks tail back to Texas with Louise, the mutt her bull-riding ex foisted on her in Wyoming after he gave another woman his heart. Maggie runs straight to Gary Fuller - her long time best friend-with-benefits and the biggest Texas country music star since George Strait - but arrives too late to save him from dying in a fire.