Carolers are singing. The Talbots are gathering. And TikTokers in a Scooby-Doo van just unearthed a thirty-five-year-old secret buried by a fourteen-foot alligator.
Ten days before Christmas, the whole Talbot clan turns out at Charleston International to send Blake, Poppy, and the kids off to Italy. Then SLED agent Sonny Ravenel walks in with news that stops the merriment cold: Frank Talbot stands accused of murder. The shock sends Frank to the ICU.
Liz Talbot’s days as a P.I. were mostly behind her. Until now. With the family reeling, Liz and her husband, Nate Andrews, will do whatever it takes to clear her father’s name.
From the moss-draped lanes of Stella Maris to the wild edges of the Outer Banks to the sultry backstreets of the Florida Keys, Liz and Nate chase a truth someone needs to stay buried.
This Christmas, that someone’s about to find out just how far the Talbots will go to protect their own.
Liz Talbot is back. Hard Candy Christmas is the first Talbot & Andrews Investigation, picking up where the Liz Talbot Mysteries left off.
Susan M. Boyer is the USA TODAY bestselling author of fourteen novels. Her debut novel, Lowcountry Boil, won the 2012 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, and garnered several other award nominations. Subsequent books have been nominated for various honors, including Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Picks, the 2016 Pat Conroy Beach Music Mystery Prize, and the 2017 Southern Book Prize in Mystery & Detective Fiction.
Big Trouble on Sullivan’s Island, the first novel in her Carolina Tales series, won the 2024 Independent Publisher Book Award silver medal in Southeast Regional Fiction and was a 2024 National Indie Excellence Award finalist.
Susan and her husband call Greenville, SC home and spend as much time as possible on the Carolina coast.