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Penny Summers Murder Mysteries

J. Marshall Gordon is an award-winning documentary script-writer, cameraman, and producer. And he writes murder mysteries that take you to the scene of the crime. Without violence or expletives.

Katelyn’s Killer

Katelyn’s Killer is woven into the fabric of Maryland’s capital city and its two most famous schools, the U. S. Naval Academy and historic St. John’s College.
Penny Summers’ first gardening job brings her face to face with a dead friend, a student at St. John’s. Facing her own demons, Penny determines to research an article as cover for sleuthing for her friend’s killer. …More

Katelyn’s Killer is a fast read with a likeable protagonist named Penny Summers. Gordon’s prose is smooth and clever, and he gives enough plot twists to keep armchair Sherlocks guessing.
— Sallie Bissell, Author of the Mary Crow thrillers.

Malice at the Manor

In Malice at the Manor, Penelope Summers visits Flat Rock North Carolina with her landscape design professor to study the famous Brantleigh Manor gardens. Her professor’s estranged stepfather is found dead in the hundred-year-old garden. Penny’s professor, Madison, is unwilling to accept the Medical Examiner’s heart attack finding and begs Penny to help find who killed him. …More

Gordon has artfully nurtured a charming whodunit. Penny … a reluctant detective with a fraught history … proves an engaging and skillful sleuth.
— Kirkus Reviews

A Sardonic Death

Penny Summers, a thirty-something ex-Navy public affairs officer, is dumbfounded to learn that her first major landscape design client, Aidan, has died. She’s doubly bumfuzzled, as her great-aunt would say, to discover that Aidan’s wife, whom she had not met, is her long-estranged mother, and triply-bumfuzzled to conclude that her mom caused Aidan’s death.

In this third mystery of the Penny Summers series, we tangle with a cast of capricious characters caught up in complex dramas, all leavened with Gordon’s humor, dry but generous like Penny’s mother’s martinis.
— Elizabeth Lutyens, Editor-in-Chief, The Great Smokies Review