This image is the cover for the book Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy, The Stewart Hoag Mysteries

Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy, The Stewart Hoag Mysteries

A scandal-plagued author is killed in a mystery with “domestic repartee worthy of Nick and Nora Charles [and a] thoroughly entertaining cast of characters” (Publishers Weekly).
 Stewart Hoag has quit ghostwriting. Living in Connecticut with his ex-wife, Hoagy works on a novel and tends to Tracy, his brand-new daughter, who’s more beautiful than anything he’s ever written and only took nine months to make. Life is peaceful, until Thor Gibbs arrives to tear it apart. An unapologetically swaggering author, Thor is past seventy but still looks like the brash young man who befriended an aging Hemingway and inspired the first of the Beat poets. Once he was Hoagy’s mentor, but now he needs his help. Thor is in the middle of a tryst with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, and every newspaper, lawyer, and cop in the country wants him strung up from the highest tree. He hires Hoagy to help the beautiful young woman tell their side of the story. But trouble is following the controversial couple, and death is about to visit the cottage.

David Handler

David Handler (b. 1952) is the critically acclaimed author of several bestselling mystery series. He began his career as a New York City reporter, and wrote his first two novels—Kiddo (1987) and Boss (1988)—about his Los Angeles childhood. In 1988 he published The Man Who Died Laughing, the first of a series of mysteries starring ghostwriter Stuart Hoag and his faithful basset hound Lulu. Handler wrote eight of the novels, winning both Edgar and American Mystery Awards for The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald (1990). The Cold Blue Blood (2001) introduced a new series character, New York film critic Mitch Berger, who fights his reclusive nature to solve crimes with the help of police Lieutenant Desiree Mitry. Handler has published eight novels starring the pair, with another, The Snow White Christmas Cookie, due out in 2012. In 2009 Handler published Click to Play, a stand-alone novel about an investigative reporter. He lives and writes in Old Lyme, Connecticut.