Miss Melville Returns

Manhattan’s art scene in the 1980s is full of backstabbers, but Miss Melville regards this as needlessly messy. She prefers to use a gun—and she uses it well, in this darkly funny series perfect for fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club.

Life is full of surprises. Susan Melville, for example, was raised to marry well, but when the Melville millions went South, she turned to...let’s call it freelance problem-solving in order to pay the rent. Bluntly? She became a hired killer. Surprise!

And now, surprisingly, her little watercolors have found an audience. Miss Melville can join the world of museums and artistes, and bid adieu to the grubby realm of hitmen and...hitwomen. Hitpeople? A shining, law-abiding life will be hers, she is certain—until another artist drops dead, the police get the story wrong, and Miss Melville is forced, yet again, to step in and tidy things up.

“Witty, sophisticated, and amusing...great finesse” —Roanoke Times

“An excellent page-turner with a merciless sense of humor” —Pittsburgh Press

“A delightful, easy-reading mystery...if everyone were as lively as Miss Melville, the whole world would have a twinkle in its eye” —Austin American-Statesman

“Miss Smith has a healthy sense of the ridiculous” —Liverpool Daily Post

“Smith's second mystery is as satirically witty and delightfully readable as the first in her series” —Tulsa World

“Wickedly witty” —Chicago Tribune

“A delightful, funny, action-packed novel” —North Bay Nugget

Evelyn E. Smith was born and lived out her life in New York City. She had two passions—for art and for cats of all sizes. She liked to claim that she wanted a lion until she realized how much they cost to feed, and she made her living as an editor, most notably running the features department at Family Circle magazine. Though she wrote four beloved Miss Melville books, she may be better known as the author of several novels and numerous short stories in the sci-fi genre; she also wrote a number of gothic romances under a pen name, and two non-fiction books on (ahem) practical witchcraft. Smith died in 2000, at the age of 77, in her beloved New York City.

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