Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Cora Finch
Meet Cora Finch and her pet-sitting sleuth Bonnie Reed. A quiet farm, a dog named Ziggy, and a body in the flowerbed before the morning coffee is even poured.
The Book: Murder She Sowed
Bonnie Reed thought she'd signed on for the easy kind of trouble — a quiet stretch of farm-sitting, a handful of opinionated animals, and a loyal dog named Ziggy keeping her company. Then, one ordinary spring morning, she finds a man face-down in the flowerbed before her coffee has had the chance to do a single thing for her. So much for the peaceful country interlude.
Spring in Riverbend is supposed to smell like lavender and fresh starts. Instead it smells like a murder nobody in town is especially sorry about. The dead man was tangled up in land deals and long-simmering grudges, and the more Bonnie tugs at the threads, the clearer it becomes that this was no accident of timing — someone planned it, and planned it carefully. With Ziggy at her heels and a set of instincts she keeps insisting she doesn't trust, Bonnie starts asking the questions the town would rather she left in the ground.
The suspects don't make it simple. Nora Vance had every reason to want the victim gone — he'd been pushing relentlessly to take her land. Douglas Pryce handled the paperwork that made those deals possible, and he's hiding just enough to be dangerous. Both of them look guilty. Neither of them quite fits. And somewhere underneath all of it is one irreversible mistake the killer has no intention of letting Bonnie dig up — which means the deeper she goes, the more dangerous the ground beneath her gets.
“A pet-sitter, a farmful of opinionated animals, and a dog named Ziggy who I suspect has the whole situation more in hand than anyone else does—this one checks every box on my favorite-tropes list. I’ve got my eye on Riverbend, on two suspects who both look guilty and somehow neither quite fits, and on that one buried mistake somebody is desperate to keep buried. Consider this your summer-porch recommendation: pour something cold, and start digging.”
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