Rained Out and Other Texas Holiday Disasters: Cozy Mysteries in a Small Town Where Everyone Is Having a Worse Holiday Than You

Attorney JD Thompson looks forward to a quiet Thanksgiving week when a raging storm floods Central Texas, confining him and his partners to the Victorian mansion where they work and live. The fine print of their agreement with the house's owner kicks in, and he and his partners must run a disaster shelter for the town of Beauchamp. The flood waters creep closer to the house, the food supply dwindles, and power and internet fail while people and their pets grow clamorous, but JD's real problem is a lost child who doesn't belong to anyone in the shelter. Can JD protect the boy and find his family, or will the storm claim one more life in a long list of tragedies?

Book 4 of the Black Orchid Enterprises Mystery series includes three holiday novelettes ranging from Thanksgiving through New Year's resolutions. Stories feature Beauchamp favorites including JD's ABBA tribute band, pets, wildlife, a drag queen security force, online romances, and fierce elderly reformers working to save their corner of the world.

After stints in professional orchestras, law firms, cat rescue, bookkeeping, and technical communication, M. R. Dimond returned to a childhood dream of writing fiction, which has turned out to be about musicians, lawyers, veterinarians, accountants, and cats. Her Black Orchid Enterprises Mystery series, set in her near-native Texas, currently contains five novels with more soon to come.She has had short fiction published in Strange Horizons, Dancing USA, and various anthologies (most recently in Dreaming the Goddess; Hook, Line, and Sinker; and Riddles, Resolutions, and Revenge), as well as nonfiction articles in various publications.She holds an MBA from University of Tulsa and is a veteran of writing workshops, including Clarion, Viable Paradise, Jim Gunn's Center for Science Fiction, and Taos Toolbox. She lives in the wilderness east of Austin, Texas, with her husband and many foster cats.