Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.0mb
Overview: The “Sigrid Harald” series by Margaret Maron is about a police lieutenant that works in New York City. The main character, Sigrid Harald, is related to Deborah Knott (which is another character that Margaret Maron writes about). The first book was released in the year 1981 with the release of “One Coffee With”. The series crossed over with the “Deborah Knott” series.
The series blossomed from a short story that Margaret wrote about her time as the secretary at Brooklyn College, in their art department. There were some exotic, not to mention quite dangerous, chemicals used in the making of prints and photography courses. Students were able to sign for the key to the locked closet and had to return the key right away, but usually, she had to hunt it down at the end of every day. Obviously, she had the idea that anyone could just help themselves to whatever deadly chemical they wanted, for whatever they wanted.
This story stuck around, in her mind, while she was writing short stories. It wound up being her longest that she had written, and it was during a time when the market for short stories was beginning to run dry. That being said, novels were too long for her, and she was intimidated by the mere idea of them. Her stories were about 57 thousand words too short for a novel.
Originally, the story starred a character, who was a cop, named for Niels Bohr. But then, it was rejected a lot of places, so she expanded it to first a novelette, later a novella, and eventually a full novel. The character became Sigrid Harald, as she saw little point in allowing critics to call the character a boring Bohr.
She knew, too, that the book she was working on (later called “One Coffee With”) would be book one of a series. Margaret knew that she would also be a lot more comfortable writing from a female point of view. The series would take place over just one year, and through the course of events, she would change and evolve just in that one year.
She wanted to have a mystery that would arch throughout the entire series; it would concern how her father, a police officer, was killed while on duty and how this would affect her life in the present.
Sigrid was made a cop and not just an amateur sleuth, because she could not come up with enough plausible reasons for some artist, knitting mother, or fashion designer to keep stumbling over bodies over the course of a few installments.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
One Coffee With (Book #1)
There was more than coffee in Professor Quinn’s morning coffee. Someone in the art department office had slipped in a spoonful of poison. Among the suspects are a young secretary, an enraged Hungarian maintenance man, and a colleague who had an affair with Quin’s wife. NYPD detective Sigrid Harold is called in to find the killer with an artistic temperament and an aptitude for death.
Death of a Butterfly (Book #2)
Lt. Harald investigates the death of Julie Redmond, a beautiful but cold, self-centered and demanding woman. Sigrid digs into Julie Redmond’s past, untangling a web of blackmail and murder and half a million dollars’ worth of stolen gems, revealing a ruthless mastermind whose cruelty has finally caught up with her.
Death in Blue Folders (Book #3)
From a long-dead movie star, the owner of a trendy art gallery, and an Algonquin Roundtable personality to a senile resident in a nursing home and a broken-down cleaning woman, Lt. Harald must figure out who hated or feared Malcolm Gladwell enough to shoot him. The investigation is not made easier by a hotter-than-usual August and her need to find a new apartment by the end of the month. Nor does it help that artist Oscar Nauman has badgered her into attending a formal charity ball when she doesn’t even own an evening dress.
The Right Jack (Book #4)
Determined to discover who was actually targeted with the bomb that put her partner into the hospital, homicide detective Sigrid Harald finds possible suspects in a college professor, a millionaire banker, and a naval intelligence officer.
Baby Doll Games (Book #5)
When a shadowy figure kills a dancer in a Greenwich Village theater before an audience of horrified children, NYPD detective Sigrid Harald is outraged and soon has a gut feeling that passion played a large part in the murder. With no physical evidence, she turns to special dolls used by therapists to help children talk about crimes they’ve witnessed.
Corpus Christmas (Book #6)
A relic of Manhattan’s Gilded Age, the Erich Bruel House on Gramercy Park contained three floors of glorious art–and one Christmas corpse. Now it’s up to Lieutenant Sigrid Harald to wrap up this homicide before the killer strikes again.
Fugitive Colors (Book #8)
Losing a fellow officer in a shoot-out is enough to rattle Sigrid’s cool, controlled demeanor. Discovering that her lover, famous artist Oscar Nauman, has also been killed devastates her. She withdraws from her colleagues, her police career, her life. But it is art she cannot escape: Oscar has left her his paintings worth millions, and galleries are clamoring to sell them. Just as the early Italian masters painted a wash of vermilion over green to produce the warm flesh tones of their Madonnas – only to have time fade the red to leave a deathlike tint behind – Sigrid begins to see through the vibrant surface of New York’s art world to the interplay of revenge, greed, and power beneath. These are motives she recognizes from her police work as catalysts for murder. And when a shocking homicide occurs, it hits close to home for Sigrid, implicating Oscar’s friends and fellow artists in the crime. Her desire to find the killer now puts Sigrid back on the job and out on the street. More than justice is at stake: whether she can still cut it on the force and whether she will ever again dare to love hangs in the balance. Fugitive Colors goes beyond the whodunit genre to combine a top-notch mystery with a portrait of a woman cop indelibly changed – able to notice the background details, the subtle shades, and the feelings that ultimately damn or save us all.
Download Instructions:
https://ouo.io/dM84P2b
Mirror:
https://ouo.io/MoPJNK
https://ouo.io/UOCnPt
Sigrid Harald #7: https://forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1294&t=3492058&hilit=Margaret+Maron
Sigrid Harald #9: https://forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1294&t=4047073&hilit=Margaret+Maron.
