Judy Alter: 30 books

The Color of Fear marks Judy Alter’s return to mystery fiction and the Kelly O’Connell series after an absence of more than a year. This time, the indomitable Keisha narrates the short tale wherein Kelly and her family live under the threat of infant Gracie’s kidnapping. The story serves as...

Arson, a bad beating, and a recluse who claims someone is trying to kill her all collide in this third Blue Plate Café Mystery with Kate Chambers. Torn between trying to save David Clinkscales, her old boss and new lover, and curiosity about Edith Aldridge’s story of an attempt on her life, Kate...

Told from a young girl's point of view, this story recounts an incident when Comanches threatened a pioneer family in North Texas. The mother was dipping candles when the Indians appeared and used the hot wax as a defense. Based on a true incident from the files of the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth, Texas, where the actual cabin, with it's vat for hot wax, is located.

In Judy Alter’s Danger Comes Home, dogs, drugs and death take Kelly on a wild ride with a runaway girl and her abused mother, a relapsed former gangsta, and a drug-dealing gang in her own neighborhood. Add in an imperious recluse for variety, and as usual Kelly’s life is anything but calm. Husband Mike Shandy is right: she has a talent for trouble.

Arson, a bad beating, and a recluse who claims someone is trying to kill her all collide in this third Blue Plate Café Mystery with Kate Chambers. Torn between trying to save David Clinkscales, her old boss and new lover, and curiosity about Edith Aldridge’s story of an attempt on her life, Kate...

Against the background of sparsley settled western Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century, Mattie tells the story of a pioneer woman physician. Through the years of her practice, Mattie finds romance and disappointment, battles won and loved ones lost. She endures to find a richness she could only find on the plains. A realistic portrait of life on the plains and one unforgettable woman.

Raised on an Oklahoma ranch in the early twentieth century, Tommy Jo Burns shuns traditional female roles and instead learns to rope and ride. At fourteen, she so impressed Teddy Roosevelt that he dubbed her America's first cowgirl. Filled with dreams of performing in a Wild West show, Tommy...

Mattie, the story of a pioneer woman physician on the western Nebraska frontier at the turn of the 20th century, is based on the life of Dr. Georgia Arbuckle Fix, and many of Mattie’s adventures come straight from Fix’s practice—the man with a hole in his skull, the drunken father whose liquor...

This cookbook grew out of Alter's lifelong love of cooking, the tips and recipes of her mother, and her own experience in a tiny kitchen with no stove. You won't find the Thanksgiving feast here, but you will find recipes from appetizers to skillet suppers, with hints on how to stock the pantry. You can use these if your kitchen is tiny or as big as all outdoors.

Kelly O’Connell never thought real estate was a dangerous profession. But while updating early-twentieth-century Craftsman houses in an older neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, she stumbles over a skeleton and begins unraveling an old murder. The police call it a cold case, but Kelly knows she must...

Her name is Elizabeth Bacon Custer, but her friends call her Libbie. The newly-wedded wife of General George Armstrong Custer, Libbie is small and delicate, accustom to the "finer things in life," seemingly unfit for the rigors of army life.But she refuses to be separated from the man she loves.Here...

Kelly O’Connell has her hands full: her husband Mike Shandy is badly injured in an automobile accident, developer Tom Lattimore wants to build a big-box grocery store called Wild Things in Kelly’s Fairmount neighborhood, and someone is stalking Kelly. Tom Lattimore’s pressure turns to threats...

Fifteen stories t that are funny and sad, modern and historical, urban and rural. They focus on women in the American West peaking in their own voices, sharing the universal female complexities of time and place. Characters—old women, ingénue, bride, mother, lover, widow, homemaker, teacher, adventuress—in...

When a serial killer begins targeting older women in Fort Worth’s Fairmount neighborhood, realtor/renovator Kelly O’Connell investigates, in spite of the pleas of her companion, policeman Mike Shandy, and her assistant, the colorful Keisha, that she stay out of it. Kelly knows a serial killer...