Mattie Winston mysteries - when nosiness turns into a full time job

What do you do when you find your surgeon husband playing tonsils hockey with a nurse in the OR?
You pack your stuff, move into your best friend spare cottage, hide indoors and stuff your face with cheesecake and ice cream till the severance money run out and then start working as your best friend assistant at the city morgue.
OK, maybe this is not what you'd do but it is what Mattie Winston did.
Former ER and OR nurse, she cannot go back working in the Sorenson's only hospital where the whole affair happened and her husband is working still so her best friend Izzy decides to use her cutting people skills and nosiness and have her help him as deputy coroner.
While Mattie is a fair skinned, 6 feet blonde with a body that has a healthy layer of thermal insulation, Izzy has olive skin, is 5 feet tall, gay and as wide as he is tall. He plays house with Dom, a fair skin beautiful man with insane cooking skills and great sense of humor and provide support to Mattie in her transition from married to almost single life.
And she needs all the support she can get. With a mega hypochondriac mother who thinks that being married to a doctor is the ultimate achievement for her daughter and with a great sister who is the perfect mother and family woman, Izzy and Dom are basically the only ones fully supporting her decision.
Still everything goes downhill when they get a call to check a murder scene and the victim turns up to be the nurse Mattie's husband was having the affair with. This makes her suspect number one along with her soon to be ex-husband. But the positive thing is that the city gets a new detective on the case in the person of Steve Hurley, a very handsome and smart man that is keen on getting the murder solved and who turns Mattie's life upside down. Their competitive behavior makes all the investigative work even more interesting and trying to find who the real killer is Mattie digs deeper into some very uncomfortable truth about some of the Sorenson's elite.

In book number two, 'Scared stiff', we have events taken place around Halloween. The holiday is a pretty scary time with all the gory decorations and trick and scare acts and it is a really unforgettable experience once you discover that one of the gory displays in your neighborhood setup is an actual corpse that was laying there in the open for a while. This event fortunately cuts short Mattie's blind date with William, a germophobe accountant with a severe case of OCD but their meeting is far from over. The victim is Shannon Tolliver, the estranged wife of Erik Tolliver, one of Mattie's former co-workers. He becomes the main suspect but Mattie, convinced by his innocence brings in her brother in law, Lucien, as Erik defense attorney. Lucien is a character of his own, a 'walking, talking harassment suit waiting to happen, but despite his appearance and tactics, Lucien is a damn good lawyer and his work and Mattie's nosiness who is dead set in proving that doctor Luke Nelson, Shannon's therapist and lover was somehow involved will get Erik out of the hook.
But since crimes normally come in pairs, Mattie has to face as well her first case of serious decomp when she is called to collect evidence from a car crash. The victims were rich and famous which drives media attention upon the case since serious inheritance is at stake and due to a series of unfortunate events at the crime scene Mattie become famous by being plastered on the cover of national tabloids sporting only her underwear. Lesson learned: watch your step when you go into the forest where leaves are covered in decomp goo and be careful that those nasty maggots like to crawl inside every rip in your protective gear. And when you buy a new-old car, low mileage is the key, appearances are not that important.

In 'Frozen stiff' Mattie's attraction to detective Hurley is put to test. The attraction was there, but due to her being a murder suspect at the beginning and Allison, the constant pain in the ass reporter being like hair on soap all over Hurley, it was difficult for them to do something about it.
But when a new murder victim is being discovered laid on ice on a side field and that proves to be Hurley super sexy and famous ex girlfriend, things get muddy.
Mattie is confused. She wants to believe he is innocent while all evidence is damning and seems that someone is pretty keen on framing Hurley for not one but multiple crimes. She will do her best, and put her job on the risk due to that, to help hims prove his innocence. She nearly loses everything and most importantly her friendship to Izzy and puts herself into the harms way once more.
On the good side, Mattie has new companions to keep her warm at night. Beside Rubbish, the stray cat she found by the dumpster and adopted instantly, she now has Hoover, a gold lab who inhales food and loves sniffing inside her slightly used blue hearse. Her mother is settling in nicely with her new boyfriend, William, the OCD germaphobe accountant Mattie had once dated but decided it is a perfect match for her mom.

In 'Lucky stiff' Mattie's divorce from David is final and she has a nice settlement to keep her warm. But a new case she starts working on brings her into the world of casinos and what starts as a fun way to spend an evening will become a hard to ditch addiction.
She cannot have a relationship with Hurley due to new rules regarding conflicts of interest at work so she is determined to find a way to make all work.
Things constantly go  between them, like the cute fire fighter woman named Candy Kane who joins them on their trip to Florida, a trip that proves disastrous for all of them but with shed some insight that will help them solve the murder case.
This book has again two murder cases on display and both prove to be tough to crack but in the end all comes unraveled.
Mattie comes to a decision and wants to have everything in life: her job back at the hospital and a life with Hurley but again, the fates have other things in mind and their only night together is cut short by the appearance of his wife and daughter at his doorsteps.

Jobless and pissed to high heaven by her live being blown to bits, Mattie spends her nights and days at the casino or hiding in her cottage. She loses this way a big chunk of her settlement, gains a few pounds but again Izzy comes to the rescue by helping her get her job back.
In 'Board stiff' Mattie gets dragged by the older than dirt owner of the Keller Funeral home, Mrs Irene Keller into the midst of a murder that took place at Twilight Nursing home. Since the murder victim was Bernie Chase, the owner of the nursing home, a guy hated by every single patient there and who was suspected by them of offing the bed-ridden patients, the suspect list is incredibly long.
Mattie gets to see again Hurley, whom she avoided for the last couple of months and their encounter shows them exactly how difficult is to keep things just professional between them.
Mattie gets to know Emily, Hurley's daughter and introduces her to her niece, Erika, her sister's daughter and the two of them get along famously.
We get to see in this book a tamer Lucien, Mattie is forced to go to a therapist who makes her ditch her nasty gambling habit, helps Lucien get together with her sister, puts herself in harms way again, almost giving Hurley a heart attack and finds out that she is pregnant, merely moments after Hurley decides to leave with Emily in the search of Emily's sick mother.

Being pregnant is the only time in a woman's life when she feels she can indulge herself.  In 'Stiff Penalty' we see Mattie doing quite the opposite. She starts going again to the gym, eats healthy and takes care of herself.
But to be fair, when you are close to 7 feet tall, have shoes close to size twelve and your weight is on the wrong side of 200 pounds, indulging can get you looking like the big white whale.
A major point in her healthy regime is her determination to keep the pregnancy hidden till Hurley returns to Sorenson which is no picnic since her morning sickness proved to be an all day round event and once that stopped the baby decided to tap dance on her bladder every hour. Plus her boobs start to look so big, they may need their own zipcode as Izzy mildly puts it.
She keeps running scenarios in her mind of how she will break the news to him but nothing will beat the reality.
We have of course two murders on the side to solve, one of a school teacher and one where Mattie gets to be the killer, a very interesting turn of events that will prove that the past never goes away but keeps coming back to bite you.

'Raising teenagers is like nailing Jell-o to a tree'. Or at least this is what Hurley and Mattie feel in 'Stiff competition', book number seven of the series. Emily after the death of her mother is a bundle of rage and attitude and nothing makes her happy. Mattie gave birth to a wonderful boy named Matthew no more than two months ago and hasn't properly slept since so Emily's attitude is really not helping her level of stress. She goes back to work because death takes no holidays and is hunting season, always a prime provider of patients to the ER and corpses to the morgue. The fresh victim is a local real estate developer with an arrow stuck in his throat and since he managed to piss off the majority of the locals and sleep with a lot of women in the same time, the suspect list is pretty darn long.
And since their lives are not complicated enough they find out that Emily is missing from school and they cannot find her anywhere.
A manhunt begins and Mattie's investigative skills are put to the test.
But comes Thanksgiving and the whole extended family is reunited around the table and all worries seem to be a problem in the past.

What do a head in the fridge, a dead hospital worker and a drowned assistant ME have in common? The answer is Mattie's father. Well, not her father per se, but the secrets that drove him into hiding when Mattie was just a toddler. He comes back into her life because the past comes back to hunt him and he wants to keep his daughter safe.
But she cannot be kept safe as long as many important characters have things to loose if the past comes to life.
So this time Mattie's nosiness is a risk for her life.
She finds out more than enough about her past much to her mother's desperation but she is still determined to find the truth about the trio of murders that plagued her small city.
She gets Allison Miller involved in the investigation, the resilient reporter and this time her chase of a story will be the end of her.
Mattie finally accepts Hurley's marriage proposal and we will see them become officially a family.

Life with a toddler is not boring and full with unexpected surprises. We find in the last book of the series, for now, just how much of a handful Matthew can be and that you need iron nerves to survive motherhood while living with a teenager in the house, albeit a tamed one for now, two cats and a dog, especially since all seem to work together to turn the house into a crazy mess.
Work is not easy as well since Mattie and Hurley need to investigate a murder suicide that turns out to be a double murder masterfully disguised.
And they have the body of an alien discovered by the construction crew on their new house plot much to the delight of Arnie Toffer, the master conspiracy theorist of the ME office.
The eye and the intuition of a woman point to evidence that may simply solve the case and Mattie's determination to clean up her father's name and put her family out of the harm's way make her find surprising ideas that she will put into work and bring the truth to light.


Annelyse Ryan is a Winsconsinite nurse who puts in her books a lot of interesting facts and stories from the ER which I believe may be true or have some parts of truth inside. Mattie Winston character is fun, witty and nosy and the cases described in the books are extremely interesting. The ratio of romance and investigative work is perfectly balanced but what I love the most are the books where she describes Mattie's challenges in pregnancy and little Matthew's mishaps around the house. It is not difficult to relate to her struggles and her sense of humor makes it for a great addictive read.
The best news is that the next book 'Dead of Winter' will be out in February and is available for pre-order.