In the first appearance of Mrs. Pollifax, Emily leaves New Brunswick, N.J., travels to Langley, V.A. and persuades a skeptical CIA recruitment officer that she is the best person for a job in Mexico. It's a simple courier job, no real spy work. Soon, however, she finds herself kidnapped, taken to Albania and imprisoned in the company of the mysterious John Sebastian Farrell.

After facing down hijackers on a flight to the Middle East and saving the lives of the passengers on board, a young American woman steps off the plane in Damascus in a blaze of celebrity and disappears. The CIA believes Amanda Pym was kidnapped, possibly murdered. Masquerading as Amanda Pym's worried aunt, Mrs. Pollifax begins her determined search, slipping through Damascus's crooked streets and crowded souks . . . and trekking deep into the desert....

Amelia, the new owner of a musty antique store filled with merry-go-round horses and hurdy-gurdies, finds a scrawled, mysterious note inside a barrel organ. Armed only with the strange woman's first name and a note written years before, Amelia begins a journey into the past where fear is second nature, and where dark secrets just might uncover murder -- even her own! -- from publisher description.

In her ninth adventure, all Mrs. Pollifax has to do is help a bumbling CIA agent confirm the identities of seven undercover informants in Morocco. A simple assignment. But right away, things go wrong. The first informant is murdered just after Mrs. P. identifies him in Fez. Worse, she has the frightening sensation that her associate is not who or what he says he is.

After writing a quick note to her husband, Mrs. Pollifax is off to Hong Kong to rescue Sheng Ti. The young agent she had successfully smuggled out of mainland China earlier finds himself involved with an alleged double agent.

Newly divorced Melissa Aubrey embarks on a cruise as an adjunct to the therapy she's undertaken for depression following her divorce. On the first leg of her journey, a mysterious fellow passenger entrusts her with a package and begs her to deliver it when she reaches Majorca. He tells her that the book in the package is of extreme importance and that he fears he will not live to deliver it himself. Melissa soon finds herself in grave danger, forced...

When novelist Andrew Thale travels to Massachusetts to check on some neglected family property, he finds a strange group of squatters staying at the house, and the longer Andrew stays there, the more he finds himself being drawn into their lifestyle.

"Mrs. Pollifax is on loan to her retired CIA friend, Farrell. Her bag lady act is the first phase of a mission to the Middle East: to smuggle out of Jordan the final manuscript of the dissident Iraqi novelist Dib Assen, who was recently murdered in an Iraqi prison. Allegedly fiction, the script encodes the shocking truth of Saddam Hussein's reign."--BOOK JACKET. "Allah willing, Farrell is to rendezvous near Amman with a man called Ibrahim, who will...

While waiting for a view of her night-blooming cereus, the mild-seeming Mrs. Pollifax received urgent orders for a daring mission to aid an escape. Soon, the unlikely-looking international spy was sporting a beautiful new hat that hid eight forged passports....

In her eleventh adventure, a missing salami leads Mrs. Pollifax to a shocking discover: a woman is hiding in her house. Even more unsettling is the revelation that ever since the young woman had a chance encounter with the heir to the throne of Ubangiba, she has been followed by deadly hit-men. What do these men want?