Cold Reading Murder (A Bridge to Death Mystery)

In the third Bridge to Death Mystery by R.J. Lee, Bridge expert and small town investigative reporter Wendy Winchester must put her amateur sleuthing skills to the test while investigating the death of a flamboyant psychic...

Bridge expert and investigative reporter Wendy Winchester knows a thing or two about navigating life along the Mississippi River, but murder isn't something she foresees...

Who could have predicted it? The daughter of Police Chief Bax Winchester married to a cop--Detective Ross Rierson. It's a beautiful wedding, and the newlyweds are in bliss--even if they do have to postpone their Hawaiian honeymoon for now. In the meantime, Wendy is teaching a group of newbies the game of bridge so they can join the Rosalie Country Club Bridge Bunch.

One of the newcomers, flamboyant psychic Aurelia Spangler, invites the group to meet at her new home. The historic Overview mansion sits atop the High Bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and the local lore is that it's possibly haunted, definitely cursed by the original builder, who fell down the stairs to his death. Unfortunately, the house is about to claim another life.

Following a night of bridge practice and cold readings by their clairvoyant host, Aurelia is found dead in her home by Wendy, a suicide note and cocaine residue by her corpse. But Wendy, an investigative reporter for the Rosalie Citizen, doesn't buy it. The scene seems phonier than Aurelia's act, and now Wendy needs to call the bluff of a cold-blooded killer playing a psychic bid...

R. J. Lee follows in the mystery-writing footsteps of his father, R. Keene Lee, who wrote fighter pilot and detective stories for Fiction House, publishers of Wings Magazine and other pulp fiction periodicals in the late '40s and '50s. Lee was born and grew up in the Mississippi River port of Natchez but also spent thirty years living in the Crescent City of New Orleans. A graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee) where he studied creative writing under Sewanee Review editor, Andrew Lytle, Lee now resides in Oxford, Mississippi.