Dinah Pelerin Mystery Series by Jeanne Matthews

# 1: Bones of Contention (2010)
The Top End of Australia is a land teeming with crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and curious Aboriginal myths. It’s a strange place to choose to end one’s life, but that is what Dinah Pelerin’s wealthy American uncle has done. Dying of cancer, he has summoned his entire family – current wife, ex-wife, assorted children and niece – to a remote, comfortless lodge where he intends to rewrite his will and commit suicide with the aid of a rogue Australian physician with whom he shares a mysterious history.
Dinah sees this time with her uncle as a last chance to learn the truth about her father, who died during the commission of a felony when she was a child. But when she arrives, she discovers that the truth has more and darker ramifications than she’d bargained on. Her artist brother thinks he’s possessed by the spirit of snake god who is moving his hand metaphysically across the canvas; her uncle, who isn’t really her uncle, is obsessed by a woman he married but could never possess; the rest of the family is seething with resentments; and a man none of them claims to know is murdered on a nearby island, impaled on the back of a sea turtle.
A wannabe anthropologist with a passion for mythology, Dinah tries to sort out the complicated song lines of her own ancestors while struggling to understand Dreamtime and solve not one, but two bizarre murders. The Aboriginal concept of payback law takes on a terrible new meaning.

# 2: Bet Your Bones (2011)
A wedding on the lip of a Hawaiian volcano sounds risky to Dinah Pelerin, the bride’s best friend and maid of honor. The bride, Claude Ann Kemper, has bet her heart that she’s found the right man at last. The groom has gone all in on a real estate deal he believes will set him and his new wife up for life. A group of Native Hawaiians claims that the sacred bones of an ancestral king are buried on the land the groom plans to sell and one of them has vowed do whatever it takes to stop him. Claude Ann’s ex-husband is stalking her and rigging booby-traps. A blackmailer is conspiring to cash in on the groom’s suspicious past. And Pele, the local fire goddess, is rocking the island with a series of earthquakes. It seems as if the stakes can’t get any higher. And then somebody shoves a member of the wedding into a flow of molten lava and all bets are off. True friendship is never easy and Dinah and Claude Ann have had their misunderstandings. But when danger threatens, Dinah is determined to protect her friend and repay the loyalty Claude Ann has shown to her if she has to walk through fire to do it. Hawaii is a hotbed of ancient myths and modern conflicts over who should control the land so cherished by its native people. If Dinah and Claude Ann are to get out alive, they’ll have to face down an angry goddess and a ruthless killer.

# 3: Bonereapers (2012)
Hewed out of a frozen mountain six hundred miles from the North Pole, the Doomsday Seed Vault was designed to safeguard the earth’s precious collection of seeds from rising sea levels, hurtling asteroids, nuclear holocaust, and every other conceivable disaster. But no fortress, however remote or carefully constructed, can protect against human corruption and men who have made it their business to gain control of the world’s food supply. Dinah Pelerin had no idea when she left sunny Hawaii on an undercover fact-finding mission to the seed vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering, or that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife. Or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms. In late December, Polar Night wraps around the little town of Longyearbyen like a lead blanket, impenetrable and endless. The temperature rarely climbs above zero and bodies don’t decompose in the permafrost. The dead have to be shipped south for burial and soon there are two murder victims headed there. Who has killed them, and why? With three U.S. senators, a powerful corporate CEO, and an Norwegian government minister as her fellow suspects, Dinah is under no illusions. She had better untangle the knot of motives and pretenses fast or suspicion will come crashing downhill like an avalanche and bury her so deep she’ll never see daylight again.

# 4: Her Boyfriend’s Bones (2013)
In 1973, on a remote beach on the Greek island of Samos, a movie star named Marilita Stephan murdered her boyfriend, his mother, and a powerful colonel in the military junta, a crime for which she was executed. Forty years later, Dinah Pelerin arrives on Samos to spend the summer with her Norwegian boyfriend Thor before she joins an archaeological dig nearby. A policeman on sabbatical, Thor seems unduly fascinated by the murders and Dinah soon discovers that he had more than romance in mind when he chose their holiday destination.
Guns supplied to the former junta by the American CIA have turned up in Norway in the hands of terrorists and Norwegian intelligence has traced the source of the weapons to Samos. The island has become a transit point for refugees fleeing the Middle East. When an Iraqi immigrant with a fake ID is killed, Thor suspects a link to the arms traffickers. But before he can investigate, his car plunges off a cliff and he disappears. Greece’s economic woes have bred corruption and Dinah fears that he was betrayed by local police and either kidnapped or murdered. Unable to trust anyone, she sets out to find him. The deeper she digs, the more connections she sees between the present crime wave and what happened in 1973. Marilita may have been innocent and the fate of her boyfriend holds eerie parallels to Thor’s disappearance. Dinah must be smarter and braver than she’s ever been to prevent another Greek tragedy.