Blood Rights: An Athena Carter Mystery

Former FBI agent Athena Carter learned the hard way to play it safe.

When her D.C. field office was bombed she quit for safer insurance investigation. And when her husband’s betrayal left her a bankrupt, widowed single mother she swore off romance. So when Phillip Madison hires her to secure his start-up’s skin serum recipe—and live on his bucolic Middleburg, Virginia estate while doing it—Athena is certain she and her daughter are finally safe. What could happen with generations of Madisons and their staff living around the horse farm?

But then Athena meets handsome and oh-so-French Pierre Devereaux, an ex-Special Forces cyber warrior, and sparks fly. And posh Middleburg turns deadly when Phillip’s partner, Frances, is found dead.

After local police close the case as an accident, Athena risks investigating Frances’s death for Phillip. But when evidence points back to the Madison estate Athena realizes the killer is close to her new adopted home. And her daughter.

Can Athena catch the murderer before he kills on the estate? And will she risk her heart once again?

Blood Rights is the first in the Athena Carter romantic mystery series and was a finalist in the Daphne Du Maurier, Kiss of Death Stiletto, Ignite the Flame, and Melody of Love Contests. The story developed from an actual event on a tribal reservation in Maine near where Court grew up. When she moved to a town not far from Middleburg, Virginia and read about historic injustices against the state’s tribes that were finally being redressed recently, she came up with part of the Blood Rights plot about a casino on the reservation. The romance—and the oh-so-French Pierre—are entirely fiction.