Carlotta Carlyle

Now available in audio, the Anthony Award-winning short story that started it all. In Lucky Penny, award-winning author Linda Barnes introduces the red-headed, jazz-loving, cab-driving Bostonian and Private Investigator Carlotta Carlyle. As Carlotta lounges in her cab one night while waiting for a fare, the part-time cabbie is accosted and robbed at gunpoint. When she is unable to get any assistance from the police, Carlotta sets out on her own to recover the stolen goods and bring the perp to justice.

As she looks for a missing taxi driver, Carlotta’s investigation sends her traveling the pub route with a bunch of blarney-loving geezers whose devotion to the Emerald Isle has gotten them involved in a deadly mix of Boston-Irish politics.

Carlotta is eating pizza when two cases are dumped into her denimclad lap. One will take her into a combat zone of hookers and pimps, the other onto the campus of a wealthy prep school.

When Carlotta Carlyle agrees to help a mysterious woman locate her missing immigration card, she doesn't anticipate any complications. But then her client disappears, and the immigration card in question turns up on the dead body of another woman. Suddenly, Carlotta is plunged into the desperate world of illegal aliens, the cold-hearted immigration agents who hunt them down, and the deadly “coyotes” who bring the innocents across the border.

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney has a secret and somebody knows it. His adulterous affair with a freshman ended just weeks before she wound up dead. The sole trace of his infatuation is a stack of missing love letters - and they’ve fallen into the wrong hands… Carlotta Carlyle takes the case to find his blackmailer and retrieve the letters. Six-foot-one and red-haired, this private eye doesn’t blink when the going gets tough.

Now available in audio, originally published in Women on the Case, an anthology of 26 original stories by the best women in crime writing, a short story featuring Linda Barnes’ feisty, redheaded, ex-cop private investigator, Carlotta Carlyle. Carlotta can’t stay away when she’s offered a beautiful piece of classic blues history - the guitar of blues and gospel legend Reverend Gary Davis - in return for finding and stopping the uncomfortable advances of a blues-singing rock star’s stalker.