Showing results by author "Ellen Crosby" in All Categories

In 1949, during her junior year abroad in Paris, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis bought several inexpensive paintings of Marie-Antoinette by a little-known 18th-century female artist. She also had a romantic relationship with Virginia vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery’s French grandfather - until recently, a well-kept secret. Seventy years later, Cricket Delacroix, Lucie’s neighbor and Jackie’s schoolfriend, is donating the now priceless paintings to a Washington, DC, museum.

In just over a week vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery and winemaker Quinn Santori will be married in a ceremony overlooking what should be acres of lush, flowering grapevines. Instead they are confronted by an ugly swathe of slowly dying vines and a nursery owner who denies responsibility for selling the diseased plants. With neighboring vineyards facing the same problem, accusations fly and the ugly stand-off between supplier and growers looks set to escalate into open warfare.

When Jamison Vaughn - billionaire real estate mogul, Virginia vineyard owner, and unsuccessful US presidential candidate - drives his gold SUV into a stone pillar at the entrance to Montgomery Estate Vineyard, Lucie Montgomery is certain the crash was deliberate. But everyone else in Atoka, Virginia, is equally sure that Jamie must have lost control of his car on a rain-slicked country road. In spite of being saddled with massive campaign debts from the recent election, Jamie is seemingly the man with the perfect life.

It's harvest season at Montgomery Estate Vineyard - the busiest time of year for winemakers in Atoka, Virginia. A skull is unearthed near Lucie Montgomery's family cemetery, and the discovery of the bones coincides with the arrival of handsome, wealthy aristocrat Jean-Claude de Merignac. He's come to be the head winemaker at neighboring La Vigne Cellars, but he's no stranger to Lucie - he was her first crush 20 years ago when she spent a summer in France. Not long after his arrival, Jean-Claude is found dead.

Lucie Montgomery and winemaker Quinn Santori have decided to make champagne, a first for the Montgomery Estate Vineyard in Atoka, Virginia. But then Gino Tomassi, Quinn's uncle, turns up on their doorstep, demanding help in solving the mystery of what happened to Zara Tomassi, the first wife of his grandfather, who died in a San Francisco hotel in 1923 under suspicious circumstances. It seems there's no coincidence that her death came the day after President Warren Harding passed away in that same hotel.

Lucie Montgomery attends a Thanksgiving weekend party for friends and neighbors at Hawthorne Castle, an honest-to-goodness castle owned by the Avery family, the last great newspaper dynasty in America and owner of the Washington Tribune. During the party, Prescott Avery, the 95-year-old family patriarch offers to pay Lucie any price for a cache of 200-year-old Madeira that her great-great-uncle discovered hidden in the US Capitol in the 1920s. By the end of the party Lucie and her fiancé discover Prescott’s body lying in his wine cellar. Is one of the guests a murderer?

When billionaire philanthropist and art collector Robson Blake hires Sophie Medina to take photographs for him, she doesn't expect to show up and find her client dead. It seems he was the victim of a burglary gone wrong. But why was his state-of-the-art security system turned off . . . and why, in a house full of priceless Old Masters, is the only thing missing a beautiful but insignificant Ukrainian religious icon?

International photojournalist Sophie Medina and her old school friend Father Jack O’Hara are out for a run on Capitol Hill when they find the body of Associate Supreme Court Justice Everett Townsend lying in an alley, barely alive. Townsend, a diabetic, later dies in the ER from complications due to hypoglycemia. His tragic death has unexpected repercussions for Sophie when Javi, a young homeless man of Sophie’s acquaintance, is murdered.