Jeanne Pelletier Mysteries Books

By day, Jeanne Pelletier is a small-town girl toiling in obscurity at a stuffy Washington, D.C., law firm; by night, she’s Zahira, the city’s newest belly dancing sensation. When a blaze rips through the city’s premier Middle Eastern nightclub and kills Jeanne’s beloved belly dance teacher Yasmina, Jeanne is drawn into a deadly mystery. Soon, she’s assembled a zany, crime-fighting urban family consisting of her obnoxious ex-CIA agent neighbor; her commune-dwelling, wild child best friend; and a sexy Scottish hacker bent on wooing the commitment-phobic Jeanne. But as Jeanne and her friends uncover a string of lovers and a web of family secrets stretching back to the Middle East, Jeanne is forced to confront a dark family secret of her own.

A chance encounter with a wealthy congressman leads to an unusual proposition… When belly dancer and amateur sleuth Jeanne Pelletier meets a wealthy conservative congressman at a Halloween party, neither is in a festive mood. Jeanne is cash-strapped, brooding over her disastrous love life, and rattled by a pair of invitations that remind her of the life she thought she had left behind. Congressman Richardson is worried about the mental stability of his wife, a beauty queen-turned-historian who claims to be terrorized by a vindictive two-hundred-year-old ghost. Before their dance is over, Jeanne agrees to investigate who—or what—is behind his wife’s “haunting.” But when Jeanne finds a body draped over a Confederate spy’s tomb near the Richardsons’ Georgetown mansion, she begins to suspect that the “haunting” has escalated to murder—and that her clients may be involved. Wracked by guilt and determined to discover his killer, Jeanne enlists the aid of her grumpy ex-CIA agent neighbor and an ex-con would-be Latin lover. But as they dig deeper into the Richardsons' sordid past, Jeanne is also forced to grapple with her own.