Galway House Publishing

Anne Suzette · Coming Soon

The Margo Vane Mysteries

Fifty-eight. Widowed. Dangerous when she notices things. Margo Vane spent twenty years in auction houses learning to tell the real from the almost-real. Now she paints in city squares, reads obituaries at breakfast in whatever language, and takes secrets apart for the pleasure of it. Each book is a standalone case, a new city, and a new man. Margo is the detective. He's the accomplice. Read in any order.

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The Bordeaux Affair cover

Book One · Bordeaux, France

The Bordeaux Affair

Margo Vane can look at anything that's been handled and tell if it's lying. Paintings. Ledgers. Faces. She arrives at Château Veyrac for the harvest expecting old friendship, good wine, and two weeks of painting badly on purpose. Then the estate's brilliant cellar master vanishes, leaving a fully charged phone face-up on his table. The gendarmes call it a man walking out on his life. Margo calls it a forgery, and the tell is a harvest toast the family has recited for 250 years without once hearing it.

The Istanbul Affair cover

Book Two · Istanbul, Turkey

The Istanbul Affair

Some women collect souvenirs. Margo Vane collects the truth. December in Istanbul: snow riding in off the Black Sea, policemen haunting the corridors of the Pera Palace, and a famous blue diamond gone from a widow's suite. Margo only came to paint badly and read the obituaries. Then a stranger's shopping bag lands in her arms on the Karaköy quay, and suddenly an innocent man sits in prison while the insurance file closes on Friday.

The Naples Affair cover

Book Three · Naples, Italy

The Naples Affair

Someone in Naples is smashing saints. Margo spots what the police miss: the broken figures in the newspaper are brothers, cast from one mold on one bench. The bench belongs to a master figure maker with terracotta-fired forearms, a proverb for every occasion, and four saints still standing. Whoever is hunting them works at night, in lamplight, on his knees, sorting the shards for something hidden inside a decade ago. Margo intends to find it first.

The Prague Affair cover

Book Four · Prague, Czech Republic

The Prague Affair

Margo Vane paints famous cities badly on purpose. Nobody watches a bad painter, and Margo is always watching. In Prague, a billionaire four months from the presidency offers her a fortune to recover a hidden archive: photographs, letters, recordings kept by the opera singer he loved and lost eight years ago. He calls it protection. Margo calls it something else, because in eight years the singer has never asked him for a single koruna.

Be there when Margo lands

The first affair, before anyone else.

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