Mary Leach – författare

Liz Maguire is in a quandary.  A woman has been found dead outside the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen near the school her two sons attend. Liz has information that might help the police, but has obtained this information confidentially and releasing it would put at risk five other women barely out of the schoolroom.The women have been caught up in an international prostitution scheme as clever as it is vicious. The scheme is broad based and includes trafficking children as well as adults.  As the wife of a Colombian diplomat experienced in fighting international drug cartels, Liz believes in trusting the police, but recent experiences have taught her that trust can sometimes be misplaced.Liz also has reason to suspect that officials in the Roman Catholic Church in Antwerp and in Baltimore have been involved. As a lifelong Catholic and former Jesuit Volunteer, Liz is proud of her church's many programs that help refugees, and hates even thinking that unscrupulous members of the clergy may be subverting these programs for their own benefit. She is particularly concerned about an irascible ninety-two year old nun, Sister Patricia Marie, a long-time family friend who seems to be caught up in the scandal – perhaps innocently.How Liz protects these young girls, helps to solve the murder and disband the prostitution network while remaining true to her professional responsibilities as a social worker at the Bethsaida Medical Center and her personal responsibilities as mother, wife and daughter form the basis of this novel, the second in the Liz Maguire series.

Liz Maguire is exhausted. The difficult birth of her fourth child, a healthy, hungry and very demanding baby girl finds her suffering from post-partum depression. Her husband Luis, busy chasing international criminals and meeting the financial challenges of his hacienda in Cartagena, seems dismissive of her health and her worries about the mounting costs of childcare and the needed repairs to her house in Roland Park.Liz is also concerned about her future prospects at the Bethsaida Medical Center. How long will her jealous colleagues continue to cover for her as she shirks her professional responsibilities? What if that source of income were to disappear?Then there is Astrid Olafsen, a Norwegian beauty who seems to have a peculiar hold over her husband. Labeled the Oslo Opportunist by Liz's friends and family, Astrid offers a way out of Luis's financial challenges by partnering with him to construct a hotel on land his hcienda owns. Liz is suspicious of the source of funds that Astrid is offering. Are these funds drug-related? Would the proposed hotel actually be a front for laundering money?And as if that weren't enough, Liz is becoming increasingly aware that there are many ancient secrets in the Oberto-Rodriguez household that threaten the stability of Luis's family and that may weigh heavily on her children, especially her oldest son Juan Diego.How Liz deals with all these challenges, while simultaneously dealing with her cranky mother-in-law, foiling would-be kidnappers and earning professional plaudits for her research on human trafficking form the basis for this novel, the third in the Liz Maguire series.

Liz Maguire's original plan was to take her mother Jill on a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach for some much-needed rest and relaxation. Before she knew what was happening that simple beach weekend had morphed into a weeklong trip to Quebec, Canada for five women: Liz, Jill and Jill's sisters-in-law Patsy and Claire and her niece Karen. As the planned trip became longer and more complicated, Jill needed to bow out, and insisted that Martina, Luis's mysterious half-sister take her place. Although Liz was concerned about how well an outsider like Martina would fit in with the others, she reluctantly agreed. The five women had barely arrived at the Chateau Frontenac when the trouble started. Liz decided to escape from the group by going for a swim in the hotel pool. There she found herself ensnared in a mess, not of her own making, involving a murder. The police were convinced that the murder victim had been involved in the drug trade, and suspected Liz of having international connections to that trade. Liz suffered a broken hip and possible concussion and ended up in a Quebec hospital. Had she fallen down the hotel's famous marble staircase or had she been pushed?  There were comedic aspects to the mess – the French dialect spoken in Quebec confounded Liz especially when the hotel room she said she was occupying showed no evidence that anyone had been there, she couldn't find her luggage and was missing some expensive jewelry, and she needed to explain having both a USA and a Colombian passport under different names.    Her husband Luis, busy chasing international criminals and meeting the financial challenges of his hacienda in Cartagena, was not answering Liz's phone calls. Liz found to her dismay that Martina knew more about her husband's whereabouts than she did. Martina kept disappearing and she also seemed to know far more about the victim of the murder than she let on. Was Martina involved in drug trafficking? Did she know the whereabouts of Liz's missing luggage and the jewelry it contained? Liz was also concerned about her mother. She had planned the trip originally because Jill seemed rundown, overburdened with her husband's medical care. Could it be that Jill herself was also ill? If so, why did she feel the need to hide this from her only child? Also, Liz's ending up in the hospital meant leaving her children for far longer than the few days originally planned, and further burdening her mother with caring for them.   Then there was the ever so helpful – and handsome – Declan O'Toole. He claimed to be a second cousin of the Maguire's who had come to help straighten out Liz's problems with the Quebec Constabulary, but who was he really?      How Liz dealt with all these challenges forms the story of the Quebec Quintet, the fourth in the Liz Maguire series.

Liz Maguire-Murphy, DrPH, associate professor of behavioral health at the Bethsaida Medical Center in Baltimore was finalizing a grant proposal to the NIH when she learned that her mother Jill had been trying to reach her. Jill had received information about a certain Jack Delaney, a man who was purported to be the father who had abandoned her and her mother in Boston some seventy years ago. Jill had also received threatening phone calls referencing Liz and her children, and was terrified that something would happen to them if she didn't do exactly what the caller demanded: refrain from notifying the police, have her DNA tested and submit results to Ancestry.com. Jill begged Liz to accompany her to Boston to explore the city that Jill vaguely remembered from her early childhood and to validate as much as possible the information that she had received. She was especially concerned that "e;Jack Delaney"e; would have been involved in nefarious activities that would hurt her and Liz if these became known.Liz was not eager to make the trip. Her husband Luis had been murdered two years earlier, leaving her with five children, a budding career, an expensive house to manage, and not enough money to meet her obligations. To take time off to visit Boston on what felt like a wild goose chase was not how she wanted to spend her Spring Break. Besides, how reliable was the memory of a five-year-old, the age that Jill had been when her father disappeared?In the material Jill had received, mixed in with ancient views of life in Boston in the 1950s were recent photos of Liz and her children, some taken in Baltimore and others at the haciendas in Colombia that had been her husband's ancestral home. Were the human traffickers and drug dealers who were responsible for Luis's death now threatening Liz's family? Jill was not the only one who was terrified.With support from her colleagues at the BMC and the timely assistance of an expert in recovered memory, Liz was persuaded to go to Boston, especially when handsome Declan O'Toole, a voice from the past who had been very helpful in dealing with Luis's death also offered his assistance. Declan had romantic feelings for her and was an expert on the international drug scene.When Josefina, Liz's long-time nanny was captured by ICE, the already complicated situation took a much darker turn. How Liz managed to remain sane and reasonably solvent while untangling the mystery of Jill's father's disappearance and rescuing Josefina is the story of The Boston Brahmin, the fifth novel in the "e;Liz Maguire"e; series.