Susan Holtzer Books In Order

Anneke Haagen Books In Order

  1. Something to Kill for (1994)
  2. Curly Smoke (1995)
  3. Bleeding Maize and Blue (1996)
  4. Black Diamond (1997)
  5. The Silly Season (1999)
  6. The Wedding Game (2000)
  7. Better Than Sex (2001)

Non fiction

  1. Special to the Daily (1990)
  2. Cable Car Confidential (2002)

Anneke Haagen Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Susan Holtzer Books Overview

Something to Kill for

Ann Arbor, Michigan home of a famous football team, a university full of experts and egomaniacs, and a lot of aging hippies, mellowing radicals, and art school eccentrics. It is also the home of Anneke Haagen, a computer consultant who spends one spring morning on the garage sale circuit. For Anneke, it’s a day of scrounging through other people’s musty junk for the Big Score until she stumbles on an antiques dealer who has been brutally attacked, and whose last words are as baffling as they are politically incorrect. When the suspicion of murder falls on her friend, Ellen Nakamura, Anneke must prove her innocence. That means not only working alongside a hunky, ex professional football player turned detective who she’s starting to fall for, but searching for the one garage sale find that wasn’t just a Big Score, it was to die for…

Curly Smoke

Fortysomething and divorced, Anneke has just lost her Ann Arbor, Michigan, home and all its contents including her extensive collection of Art Deco objects to a fire. She finds temporary refuge in Mackinac Court, an intriguing grouping of mismatched houses filled with equally unlikely tenants. In the midst of a winter snowstorm, Anneke gets to know her neighbors in the court, and hears their arguments for and against selling the houses to an office park developer. But rancor turns lethal when one of the residents is later found lying dead in the snow, and Anneke starts to question the earlier, presumably natural death of an influential old woman who had lived in the court. With occasional help and a lot of moral support from her police lieutenant lover, former Pittsburgh Steeler Karl Genesko, Anneke sorts out the jealousies and rivalries in the small group and arrives at a dangerous solution.

Bleeding Maize and Blue

When football and greed collide, the result is sudden death…
In football obsessed Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan President’s Weekend is the biggest event of the season. And this year, computer consultant Anneke Haagen is swept up in the festivities her boyfriend, police lieutenant Karl Genesko, is set to be honored as one of Michigan’s brightest former football stars. But the weekend quickly sours when Zoe Kaplan, a Michigan Daily student sportswriter, breaks the story of an NCAA probe of UM recruiting…
and hours later the agency’s investigator turns up murdered on the sacred turf of the stadium end zone. Genesko finds himself at the head of the investigation, and Anneke can’t resist applying her computer skills and analytical mind to the mystery herself. What she finds is a tangle of secrets, lies, and shady deals, with the deepest alumni pockets in the thick of it. And with the university’s reputation and big money program at stake, she’d better find the killer’s playbook, before she’s the next to be sacked…

Black Diamond

In exchange for some missed class notes, University of Michigan student and sports reporter Zoe Kaplan agrees to drive drab dorm mate Clare Swann to her eccentric late aunt’s estate for the sorting of her possessions. When the will is read, Clare is handed the mysterious ‘Black Diamond,’ a porcupine quill covered black box filled with seemingly meaningless mementos. But when Zoe and Clare return to Clare’s dorm after a trip to the library, they find the place ripped apart, the Black Diamond missing, and a man with a gashed throat lying dead on Clare’s floor a a man whom Clare recognizes as her father, assumed dead years ago. Enlisting her friend, clear minded computer expert beneath the layers of a logging family’s dark past and into a present rife with murderous ambition.

The Silly Season

Strange lights in the Michigan sky. The gathering horde of psychics, alien abductees, and millennialists swear it’s an authentic UFO hovering over UM, but to student and Daily sports reporter Zoe Kaplan, the sightings look like a group of fireflies mating. The controversy deepends when history professor Thomas Edison Stempel, a dedicated ufologist, suspects that someone is trying to discredit his extensive research. His archenemy, biochemistry professor Conrad deLeeuw, thinks Stempel set the whole thing up, and fanatic Jarvis McCray claims documented proof of alien/government conspiracy. Was it a hoax, or a cleverly designed plot to kill?Police lieutenant Karl Genesko is stymied, while his fiancee, computer consultant Anneke Haagen, is amused, and Zoe is thrilled at the chance to string the story for the AP. But when Professor Stempel turns up electrocuted on a wide swath of burned field, the silly summer season turns deadly. Genesko’s out to trap the killer with a trap so dangerous he may not survive to tell the tale.

The Wedding Game

Police lieutenant Karl Genesko and his fiancee, computer pro Anneke Haagen, are finally tying the knot and in law deep in pre wedding jitters and activities. Anneke’s grown daughters and granddaughter are arriving soon, she’s got her consulting business ends tied up, and the University of Michigan’s Art Museum rotunda is a glorious wedding locale. But when Karl is called away suddenly to investigate a mailbomb murder in Oakland, the victim turns out to be ‘Vince Mattus’ and the happy couple become suspects in the case. Mattus is one of six computer gamers in Anneke’s on line chats evidence found in his apartment links the group, and Karl, to the murder. From a punk party girl to a Silicon Valley heavy, the suspects create a murder game to catch the killer on line. As the game zeroes in on the culprit, identities disappear and emerge. And for Karl and Anneke, ’till death do us part’ might happen sooner than anyone suspected…

Better Than Sex

Newlyweds Anneke Haagen and Police Lieutenant Karl Genesko are enjoying their honeymoon in San Francisco when they receive an invitation from Richard Killian, Anneke’s friend, to watch the University of Michigan game at his sports bar, Maize and Blue. Anneke gladly accepts the invitation, but when Anneke and Karl arrive, they discover that a number of things would have been better than going to Maize and Blue. A Michigan graduate student, Lindsay Summers, has something other than the game on her mind: she is interviewing everyone about what triggers their urges to overeat, which doesn’t make her very popular. But is that reason enough to kill her? Anneke and Karl soon find themselves dragged into the investigation to help their friend Richard, who has become the prime suspect. As they search for answers amid a shish kebab of food activists with a dozen different agendas, deadly secrets are revealed secrets that one person will ensure stay buried even if it means resorting to murder again and again…
AUTHORBIO: SUSAN HOLTZER divides her time between Ann Arbor and the San Francisco area. Better Than Sex is her seventh book in the University of Michigan series.

Special to the Daily

This commemorative volume marks the 100th anniversary of publication of The Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan, and contains reprints of key articles from those 100 years as well as commentary about the newspaper.

Cable Car Confidential

Tourists and local alike will delight in this irreverent account of life as it is really lived behind the gfrip of San Francisco’s most beloved icon, the cable car.

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