Bitter Bones

Finding the long-dead baby in the overnight case was bad enough, but when a second body turns up in her friend Linnet Halliday’s garden, Geneva Bradford decides to find the murderer. There’s a perfectly good police department in Byford, Massachusetts, but Geneva thinks her friend Chief Paxton Cole isn’t moving fast enough and could use a bit of help. Thanks to a web of friends and cousins more widespread than kudzu, she gathers clues which eventually point to a suspect.

Geneva’s got plenty of other things to keep her busy: her children, her antique shop and her cattery, not to mention her secret life as a thriller writer and her budding romance with the handsome epidemiologist Charles Bonacorso. And that little matter of an old, long-buried crime in her own past which she hoped would never come to light.

Chief Cole finds Geneva’s efforts less than helpfulâ€"he’s doing his own investigation his own way. However, when it looks like the murderer may be targeting Geneva, he begins to think she may be on to something. Now if he can just keep her under control while he gathers usable evidence.

Carried away by how cleverly she’s put together the clues, Geneva forgets that unlike the fictional villains in her books, a real killer will kill again to cover past crimes. There’s nothing like being gagged and tied to a chair to focus your mind on the Girl Scout badges you didn’t complete.