Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis introduces one of her most winning heroines, Julie Hayes, a former actress turned fortune-teller who abruptly learns there is murder in her future Twenty-five-year-old Julie Hayes is feeling overshadowed by her globe-trotting journalist husband and looking for some excitement and direction in life. On what amounts to a dare, she sets herself up as “Friend Julie,” a storefront fortune-teller in Manhattan’s seedy Theater District. Now Julie finds herself concerned with the lives of the neighborhood eccentrics, old friends from the Actors Forum, and street characters such as Goldie the pimp, a wealthy gangster, and a young prostitute who wants Julie to help her escape The Life. But a man is found murdered in the girl’s room—a man Julie can identify for the police. Thrust into the investigation of the man’s death, Julie discovers a new direction for her life, but her tarot cards reveal a future she might not live to see. A Death in The Life is the first novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s Julie Hayes mystery series, which also includes Scarlet Night, Lullaby of Murder, and The Habit of Fear, as well as the stories “The Puppet” and “Justina” in the collection In the Still of the Night .

Determined to rid her home of all vestiges of her husband's first wife, Julie Hayes begins hunting in the galleries of SoHo for a painting and becomes involved in a mystery involving the theft of a priceless painting

Julie Hayes writes a story on a dance marathon for gossip columnist Tony Alexander and finds herself in the midst of mysterious and dangerous events

The final novel in Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s Julie Hayes mystery series takes the amateur sleuth from the mean streets of Manhattan to Ireland in search of the father she never knew Julie Hayes is finally making it as a reporter—with a column at the New York Daily under her own byline—when her husband, Jeff, tells her he has fallen in love with another woman and wants a divorce. Blinded by anger and hurt, she flees their Chelsea apartment. Before the night is over, she will be lying bound and gagged on the floor of a trailer, the victim of a sexual assault by two masked men. Now a tabloid headline herself, Julie tries to help the police search for her assailants. But she is not the same woman anymore. She decides it’s time to uncover her mysterious past. Her birth certificate lists her father as Thomas Francis Mooney. Born in Ireland, whereabouts unknown. But danger stalks Julie across the Atlantic, where she is caught up in seething IRA tensions and sees strange connections between her past and present. Now she has an even more urgent goal: to get out of Ireland alive. The Habit of Fear is the fourth novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s Julie Hayes mystery series, which also includes A Death in The Life, Scarlet Night, and Lullaby of Murder, as well as the stories “The Puppet” and “Justina” in the collection In the Still of the Night.

A collection of eight suspenseful tales from one of the century’s finest crime authors With stories published when the author was in her seventies and eighties, this collection proves that after five decades writing crime fiction, Dorothy Salisbury Davis has lost none of her edge. In “Christopher and Maggie,” based on Davis’s own experiences during the Great Depression, a traveling magician stumbles upon a murder victim. In other stories, a woman picks up the wrong hitchhiker, an ex-detective decides to make some money by getting rid of his wife—forever—and a man gets involved in a road accident from which he simply cannot drive away. The Manhattan gossip columnist and part-time sleuth Julie Hayes from A Death in The Life appears in two stories, “The Puppet” and “Justina.” Intelligent, chilling, and beautifully written, these stories are a reminder that in crime fiction, there is no substitute for the Grand Master’s touch.