Death is what happens while you're making other plans.
Death is what happens while you're making other plans.
Death is what happens while you're making other plans.
Kirsty d’Arc is enjoying life, until someone she trusts hijacks her soul in this first installment of The Reluctant Reaper series. To escape Hell’s inferno and gain revenge, Kirsty must partner with the very Reaper who scythed her—the hunky dead poet Dante Alighieri.
Life for Kirsty d’Arc might not be perfect, but it’s far from hellish. She likes her job, has a great BFF, and truly admires Conrad, her boss. But when she dives in front of a lunatic’s blade to save him from certain death, she finds out Conrad isn’t so admirable after all. In fact, he’s traded her soul to the Devil!
While her body lies comatose on the Mortal Coil, Kirsty’s spirit is dragged straight to Hell…which is not quite the fire-and-brimstone abyss she’d expected. In fact, the place is quirky, wacky, and not without charm. Desperate to reunite body and soul before her time runs out, she seeks out allies, earning the friendship of a powerful drag demon, a psychic server, and, most importantly, Hell’s civil servant. But what of her growing attraction to Dante, the sexy Reaper with a flair for romantic language—can she forgive him for scything her soul?
Stuck in the netherworld, Kirsty vows she’ll do everything on her postmortem bucket list, starting with getting her life back and ensuring that Conrad has Hell to pay!
Be careful what you wish for; it just might get you!
Death is what happens while you're making other plans.
Kirsty’s afterlife gets even more Hellish in this second installment of The Reluctant Reaper series when her soul-stealing ex-boss targets her beloved aunt. Her only chance to stop him? Becoming a Reaper herself. Fortunately, her hunky new boyfriend, Italian-poet-turned-Reaper Dante Alighieri, is there to help.
Still trapped in the bureaucratic inferno known as Hell, Kirsty d’Arc redoubles her efforts to escape back to the Mortal Coil when she learns Conrad is after the soul of her beloved aunt. To save Aunt Carey, Kirsty must enroll at the Reaper Academy and earn a scythe of her own. Studying topics like Exor-scything 101, Riding the Death Cycle, and Reincarnation for Dummies is strange. But then, so are her classmates: a fallen angel, the Death Valley girls, and Kali—the ancient god of death, destruction, and those little earring backs that always go missing.
Now time is running out thanks to a temporal crisis she may have accidentally created. Can she graduate, rescue her aunt, take down Conrad, and save Hell and every other dimension—before the clock stops ticking?
As the saying goes in Hell, “Be careful what you wish for; it just might get you!”
Hell is where the heart is.
In the third hilarious installment of The Reluctant Reaper series, Kirsty d’Arc’s first Reaper mission gets personal when her evil ex-boss escapes from Hell and physically possesses Shannon, Kirsty’s BFF. To reunite rightful body and soul, Kirsty must outwit a demented demon, fend off an insane strangler, and bend the very rules of Hell and Earth.
Kirsty may be a full-fledged Reaper with a scythe of her own, but Dante is still miffed that she broke the Reaper rules to take down her evil ex-boss, Conrad. And Dante is not above saying “I told you so” when Conrad develops strange demonic powers and escapes to the Mortal Coil. Although barely speaking, Kirsty and Dante are sent on Kirsty’s first Reaper mission: bring Conrad back alive…er…dead…er…Just bring him back to Hell.
But before they can re-scythe him, Conrad evicts his own daughter’s soul to take over her body. Yes, he’s not a good person. So it’s up to two good people (who are, ironically, from Hell) to fix this. But can Kirsty and Dante put their differences aside in time to take down Conrad and save his daughter?
How Power Tools Led Me to Murder
In 2018, after 60-plus years in Toronto, I moved to a small town just north of there and started over. The first thing I did was buy myself a drill-driver set. Unfortunately, the tutorials assumed I knew which was which.
I did not.
Fast forward to 2025. My neighbor just asked if he could borrow my saw. “Which one?” I replied. “Compound miter, circular, jig, reciprocating, hack, or pruning?” Not only do I own them all—I know how to use them, along with a bunch of other useful gadgets. Power tools are my jam, as the kids say. (Or they did. It’s hard to keep up.)
When I sat down to write my first cozy mystery (after a long hiatus from writing), I thought my sleuth would be like me: an upcycler in her sixties. And she is… except Agatha Shadewell is nothing like me, being a career criminal, which I am not. Honest. But maybe I could have been. Turns out I have a knack for imagining clever heists and cons. But I swear I’ve never tried any of them.
And surprisingly, crime and DIY overlap more than you’d think. Like, say…
• If you can rewire a lamp, you can outsmart an alarm system.
• If you can repair a bookshelf, you can remove an air conditioner and wriggle through the opening.
• If you can re-create the molding on an antique sideboard, you can probably fake an eyeball to trick a retinal scanner.
Well, Agatha can. Me? I wouldn’t know.
Like many writers, I hear my characters talking in my head—Agatha and her partner-in-crime Martin loudest of all. Echo, the teen hacker, takes a little more effort. Kids, eh? They never do what you want ’em to. Luckily, I spend plenty of time with my grandnieces, who keep me fluent in teenage sarcasm.
And Chance? Agatha’s scrappy sidekick is based on my own doggo, Canoli, the rescued Mexican street dog named for the Italian pastry. He gives me plenty of advice on how to write about Agatha’s dog. I pay for 'Noli’s input in dried liver treats.
So that’s how power tools (and one opinionated dog) led me to write The Unlikely Murder Club series.
How did you get to Unlikely?