Front Page Teaser · A Liz Higgins Mystery

This Boston-based mystery stars smart and sassy Beantown Banner reporter Liz Higgins, who rails at being assigned only light news highlighted in front page teasers. She vows to change that by finding a missing mom and nailing front-page news in the process. Liz's quest takes her into Boston's lively Irish pub/Celtic music scene, the elegant Wellesley landscape, and as far as Fiji. Along the way, she courageously pursues a tangle of clues and falls for two very different men: the enigmatic forensics expert Dr. Cormack Kinnaird and the warmhearted Tom Horton, who pastes ads on the huge billboard that dwarfs Liz's tiny house on the edge of the Mass Pike.

From Publishers WeeklyHerbert, the editor of several mystery anthologies and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, turns that wealth of experience to effective use in her intelligent and thought-provoking mystery debut. Liz Higgins, a feature reporter for the Beantown Banner with hard news aspirations, jumps at the opportunity to help cover the disappearance of Ellen Johansson, who goes missing from her suburban Boston home the week before Christmas in 2000, leaving a blood-spattered kitchen and some conflicting clues. Dogged reporting leads Higgins on a trail that includes Johansson's reading habits, her correspondence with an Israeli pen pal, a chance encounter with a New York City cab driver, and an incident buried in Johansson's childhood. Herbert makes artful use of the looming date of 9/11 as the action builds to an unexpected but satisfying outcome. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

ReviewRosemary Herbert is a fresh and compelling new voice in crime fiction. Like a shot of good whiskey, Front Page Teaser is short and bracing. You'll love it. I did. (Robert B. Parker)

Making her debut as a novelist, Herbert, a former LJ reviewer, librarian, and authority on the mystery novel (The Oxford Companion to Crime Mystery Writing), brings all of her newspaper experience to bear in this neatly plotted tale of misdirection. (Library Journal)

Front Page Teaser is a gripping tale of an investigative reporter on the hunt. Rosemary Herbert has a huge advantage in writing it. As one of us 'ink-stained wretches' who write the news, she's been there and done that, knows the way reporters write and how to make the story move. (Tom Hillerman)

Front Page Teaser puts readers smack dab in the middle of the newsroom. In this Boston-inflected tale...Rosemary Herbert shows why a newspaper is the best place for a mystery writer to start and a fine place to start a mystery. Front Page Teaser is a winner and so is Liz Higgins. I look forward to Herbert handing her scrappy reporter her next assignment. (Gerry Boyle)

In Front Page Teaser — which could easily be called Front Page Turner — Rosemary Herbert has spun a masterful web of mystery and murder. This book has movie — good movie — written all over it. (Alfred Alcorn)