Hell with the Lid Blown Off

In the summer of 1916, a big twister cuts a swath of destruction around Boynton, Oklahoma. Alafair Tucker's family and neighbors are not spared the ruin and grief spread by the storm. But no one is going to mourn for dead Jubal Beldon, who'd made it his business to know the ugly secrets of everyone in town. It never mattered if Jubal's insinuations were true or not since in a small town like Boynton, rumor could be as ruinous as fact. Then Mr. Lee, the undertaker, does his grim duty for the storm victims and discovers that even in death, troublemaker Jubal isn't going to leave his neighbors in peace. Jubal was already dead when the tornado carried his body to the middle of a fallow field. Had he died in an accident or had he been murdered by someone whose secret he had threatened to expose? Dozens of people would have been happy to do the deed, some of them members of Jubal's own family like his angry, disinherited brothers. As Sheriff Scott Tucker and his deputy Trenton Calder look into Jubal's demise, it begins to look like the prime suspect may be someone very dear to the widow Beckie MacKenzie, the beloved music teacher and mentor of Alafair's daughter Ruth. Ruth fears that the secrets exposed by the investigation are going to cause more damage to Beckie's life than the tornado. Alafair, coping with injuries to her own, still has time for suspicions about how Jubal Beldon came to die. What if the truth of it hits very close to home?