My name is Kathleen Yasas and I am a professional editor and writer living in New York’s picturesque Chenango Valley, the word “Chenango” originating from the language of the Oneida Native Americans and meaning, loosely, the land of the bull thistle. My work focuses on literary fiction, including my newest novel The Cookie Tree; and the Kelly Quinn series, which is detective/mystery. First in the Kelly Quinn series is I Did It For Alice (2020), and second is Murder at Cricket Lake (2023). Third in the series, The Missing X, will be available in 2026. Check this space again for information on more upcoming work, such as Holliday House, about the Holliday sisters and their highly unconventional family. I hope you enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoy writing them. Please scroll down for synopses of my novels.
So…welcome to my website. It’s a user-friendly one and is designed for readers to purchase books online (visit Store in the links above). Books will be shipped directly from the publisher and are not available on Amazon. Also note that my works are not available on Kindle, but that may change in the near future.
Thanks for visiting,
Kathleen
As John Barrymore once said, happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
Margaret Andersson has led an unremarkable life. Some might even say a wasted one. As a young teenager with family money and the world before her, Margaret’s future is stunted when her teenage girlfriends abandon her for no reason ever explained. She knows she is not the first teen to be bullied and left behind, and she knows that others in similar circumstances simply move on. Margaret, however, cannot. Her bitterness and lonely days morph into years, with her sole companion her mother Ada, who dies young of cancer. Now Margaret must trudge on alone in her small hometown where she senses judgment and, at times, contempt.
When the unlikeliest of change agents appears on her doorstep, Margaret comes to understand that the path to the left, upon which she began her journey long ago, is not carved in stone. The path to the right—where happiness is a choice—is directly in front of her; she need only take the first step. The Cookie Tree is a story about spiritual redemption…and about a little dog named Harry.
In the early hours of morning, not long after midnight, a Gold Coast husband returns home from a night of infidelity to find his wife dead, her wrists bleeding out on the marble tile of their swimming pool. Barbara Ann Hudson is not the first to die of what is presumed suicide in the summer of 2018, and she won’t be the last.
Former sweethearts Kelly Quinn and Dinah Pelling set out to investigate Barbara Ann’s death and unearth something unexpected: that other friends in the high school class of 1996 are also dying. Is it suicide, accident…or murder?
I Did It For Alice is a story in the spirit of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. There is crime and suspense, leisure-class lifestyles, offbeat humor, and just a dollop of flirtatious true love.
Kelly Quinn and company are off to Cricket Lake to spend the Christmas holidays, looking forward to a peaceful vacation. While a snowstorm is predicted, and while the idea of being snowed in is not unappealing, they do not imagine that being trapped by snow can be terrifying…and deadly. Thirty years before, the Cricket Lake house was the scene of an unspeakable murder, but those days are long in the past, or so they think. What they don’t know is that the murderer is still alive, still in town, still watching. And still waiting.
Kelly is a typical PI, so typical some say he should have his own TV show: smart, handsome, sarcastic. His job is not risky. He follows cheating spouses in a small Central New York town. He has one employee, a girlfriend, and a mother who is splendidly eccentric and often absurd. He collects fish and, occasionally dumpster dives. He has a little house in a hollow with a koi pond. Kelly Quinn’s life is not complicated, and certainly not dangerous.
Until Cricket Lake.
Coming in 2026, third in the Kelly Quinn detective series:
The Missing X
Coming in 2027