True history and puzzling mystery
The Lady Hay Investigates series
Lady Grace Drummond-Hay was the first woman to cross the Atlantic on a passenger flight. The first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air. And was aboard the first Europe-to-US flight of the Hindenburg. They called her “Lady Zeppelin,” a young widow who was clever, beautiful, and one of the most popular journalists of her time. So history tells us. But what if she also had a knack for solving murders?
Death on the Graf Zeppelin
Lady Hay Investigates Book 1
Sibylline Press, October 23, 2026
The flight of the Graf Zeppelin is making headlines around the world. News of a murder on board cannot be one of them.
In 1928, young British widow Lady Grace Drummond-Hay is thrilled to be among the five journalists chosen to fly aboard the Graf Zeppelin, the most advanced airship in the world, on its voyage from Germany to America. She is the first woman in history to make the Atlantic crossing by passenger airship, documenting her experience moment by moment for the Hearst newspapers. When the body of a young stowaway is discovered, the ship’s commander, Hugo Eckener, requests Grace’s discreet assistance to find out what happened. Grace doesn’t believe for a minute that it was suicide. But how to prove it without sending the other passengers into a panic—and before they reach America? For it will be all too easy for a murderer to vanish among the thousands of people waiting at Lakehurst to witness their historic landing. Grace must enlist help if she is to flush out the killer during the four-day voyage. The only person she can turn to is Karl von Wiegand, former mentor, dedicated journalist … and the man who ended their own love story just six months before.
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Death at Ocean House
Lady Hay Investigates Book 2
Sibylline Press, October 22, 2027
In Hollywood, everyone has a secret. Grace intends to find the one that killed Adelaide Preston.
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Death on the Hindenburg
Lady Hay Investigates Book 3
Sibylline Press, Spring 2028
On the maiden flight of the Hindenburg in 1936, there are Nazis on board. And titled English nobility. And a murderer.
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The Holy City duet
A refuge in the redwoods or a clever con?
Holy City: a novel
Moonshell Books, Inc. • Fall 2026
Includes a nonfiction tour of Holy City as it was in the Roaring Twenties
A refuge in the redwoods or a clever con?
Lucille Riker quietly runs the town of Holy City, California, looking after the aging flock of disciples of the Perfect Christian Divine Way, and is perpetually cleaning up the messes of her husband, William Riker, the prophet. She is able to hold it all together until 1927, when the town and the PCDW are rocked by scandal. Again. This time, it’s his secretary, who claims Riker promised to marry her and has filed a “love balm” suit for half a million dollars. Though hard experience tells Lucille he’s guilty, for the sake of the disciples’ faith, and facing the loss of everything that gives her life meaning, she has to defend him in court.
Newcomer Clara Cercatore, who had arrived destitute and desperate in the summer, is working as a waitress in the town’s restaurant. She is shocked that Lucille is standing by her man when he treats her like dirt and cheats on her with anything in skirts. But Clara can’t question Lucille, because she’s hiding her own secret—one that could get her run out of town. The longer she stays, the more she sees the dark side of Holy City—the racist predator with delusions of grandeur, the religion whose only god is money, the aging disciples who have nowhere else to go.
Without a cent to her name, Clara can’t leave, either. But when a reporter shows up in Holy City and breaks the story of her own scandalous past, Lucille makes her an offer that could save her … or make her a target the prophet can’t refuse.
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The Poet of Holy City
The Collected Works of Lucille Riker, 1916–1945
Nonfiction • Moonshell Books, Inc. • Fall 2026
Edited by Shelley Adina Bates
Lucinda “Lucille” Jensen Schutrum Riker was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 1, 1874. Little is known about her childhood or her life as a single woman, except that her family was well off and she graduated with a degree from university. But after her marriage in 1914 to William Edward Riker (1873–1969) and their moves to San Francisco and Holy City, she became a published poet in loyal support of the cult he founded, the Perfect Christian Divine Way.
While many in the San Francisco Bay Area in the twenties and thirties recognized Riker’s name from his many scandals and court cases, few knew that his wife was a writer. Her work can be found in the I.B. Fisher Collection at History San Jose, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the University of California Riverside Library. She may have been one of those accomplished but forgotten women in history, but she was also a poet, essayist, and songwriter, as well as a complex woman complicit in the long con that gave her a home.
Her voice may have been nearly drowned out by that of her husband, but in this volume, gathered in one place for the first time, her poems still stubbornly exist, just like the ruins of Holy City.
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