weddings -- fiction

Lucy is asked by her friend Sue Finch to help plan the wedding of Sue's daughter to an Internet millionaire. When the groom's body is found floating beside his yacht, Lucy's not convinced this was an accident. Soon, Lucy finds herself contemplating her own funeral as she launches a harrowing pursuit of a killer.

"It should be the happiest day of Goldy the caterer's life. After years of putting the disaster of her first marriage behind her, she has finally found the courage to love again. Soon she'll be walking down the aisle of St. Luke's Episcopal Church to wed the man of her dreams, Tom Schulz, a homicide detective who shares Goldy's passions for preparing food and solving crimes.

"But moments after Goldy's put the finishing touches on the scrumptious wedding feast, and just before the ceremony begins, she receives an urgent phone call from the groom. The wedding is off, and the reason is a killer.

"In The Last Suppers, Diane Mott Davidson mixes irresistible suspense with delectable humor to create a five-star treat for readers and cooks alike. Included are Goldy's original recipes for such delicious dishes as her heavenly Dark Chocolate Wedding Cake with White Peppermint Frosting, savory Shrimp on Wheels and zesty Fusilli in Parmesan Cream Sauce."

It would be a challenge enough for perpetual list-maker Molly West, the director of a meal-delivery program in southern Ohio, to plan an ordinary wedding for her daughter. But this is no ordinary wedding. Molly's daughter wants the ceremony to be a costumed Civil War reenactment - and the date is only two months away. To complicate matters, Sheriff Matins warns Molly that an escaped convict is on his way to their Appalachian county, intent on disrupting more than just the wedding plans.

Then a bridesmaid finds a skeleton hidden in the caves beneath her historic home - caves once used by slaves fleeing the Confederacy. Is the skeleton the remains of a forgotten Union soldier, or a more recent victim of an unsolved murder? When the case brings local stories of Civil War-era struggles back to life, Molly and her friends realize that their tight-knit community hides more than one unpleasant secret.

Jane Jeffry and her best friend Shelley are being paid to plan a wedding in a remote, rundown monastery-turned-hunt club. But as they rush to transform the musty, moosehead-lined halls into a matrimonial wonderland, one almost-participant takes a suspicious slippery tumble to a very sudden death.

The mousy bride-to-be's pushy papa insists that the marriage show must go on, despite Jane's nagging near certainty that the victim was unceremoniously "helped" down the stairs. And now Jane's going to have to come up with a murderer and a motive, even as the first strains of the bridal march begin.

When two of Peyton Cross' bridesmaids die in freak accidents, the third turns for help to Bailey Weggins, true crime writer, sometime-sleuth, and Peyton's former college roommate. A dangerous trail of clues leads Bailey from the elegant suburbs of Connecticut to New York's Lower East Side to a fabulous oceanfront hotel room in Miami.

When Madeline Bean throws the hippest bachelorette luau ever--with a suspiciously laid-back beach boy, a murderer in their midst, and a freaking volcano eruption--it looks like anything but happily ever after.