Gretchen Archer is a Tennessee housewife who began writing when her daughters, seeking higher educations, ran off and left her. She lives on Lookout Mountain with her husband, son, and a Yorkie named Bently. She's had multiple books hit the USA Today bestseller list.

capers, humorous mysteries, Southern fiction

THIS JUST IN: On the weather front, Category Four Hurricane Kevin took a last-minute left and is headed straight for the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. In breaking news, Undercover Casino Operative Davis Way has one foot out the evacuation door when fifty million dollars disappear, and in its place, a dead body. In other news, if forced to ride out the storm on the hotel’s thirteenth-floor fortress, Davis won’t be alone. Her husband, Bradley, her best friend, Fantasy, and a crew of highly trained first responders will be hurricane hostages too, along with Mississippi State Gaming Agents, a FEMA agent, an insurance agent, a State Special Agent, and an Emergency Response Agent—at least one of them a double agent. The good news is her high school reunion is cancelled. The bad news is everything else. The fake news features a castaway pig named Bacon. The hurricane heist headlines will be sensational. If Davis survives to see them.

Davis Way Cole smells T-R-O-U-B-L-E when she’s fired from half of her part-time job at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi. The quarter-time job she’s left with is lulling her to sleep, exactly what she’s doing when Birdy James, centenarian director of the casino’s Lost and Found department, disappears. With five million dollars. If Davis doesn’t find the little old lady and the money fast, she’ll lose what’s left of her job, at which point, there goes her Bellissimo everything. What she needs is a good luck charm. What she gets is her home invaded by hard-headed women, a soft-hearted little man, and major carpet troubles, the combination of which sends Davis’s already suspicious mind into overdrive, and landing her between a jailhouse rock and a very hard place. A little less conversation and a lot more action are called for if Davis has any chance of saving herself, her family, her marriage, her job, and the heartbreak hotel she calls home. Thank you. Thank you very much.