Cataloged for Murder

About this book

Simone Varga could match you with anybody in Vermont from a sample of your spit. On the afternoon of the Clover Lake lantern float she told a gym full of hopeful singles that two of them were family, laughed, and promised to say which two when the lights went down.

The lights went down for twenty minutes. In the morning a retired surveyor found her from his canoe.

Clover Lake never wanted a rival matchmaker from Burlington at its Harvest Festival, and after what she did in August it does not much want Ivy Bloom either. But the last person Ivy saw with Simone, holding her hard by the arm on the dock, was Chief Nash Calloway, who walks his dog past Ivy's porch every Tuesday. Nash will not say one word about what she asked him. Not to the state police. Not to the town. Not to Ivy.

They take his badge.

Ivy is not a detective. This fall she is barely a matchmaker.

The agency roof leaks, half the town has stopped speaking to her, and a man with an envelope of cash wants one small, quiet favor from the Lovebird Agency. Ivy takes the money. The favor is aimed at people the agency is supposed to help, and by the time she understands what she has sold, she has done the worst thing a matchmaker can do, in a town where the whole Grand Union will know by Thursday.

What you are getting
A fair-play puzzle. Every clue is on the page before the reveal, most of them in broad daylight.
A lantern float, a charity auction, a wedding in Poultney, and Thanksgiving in a barn for forty.
Warm, wry and closed-door. No gore. No spice. One body, and she was a person for five chapters first.

What you are not getting
The cat solves nothing. He is, however, sold at auction for forty dollars.
The romance amounts to very little, again, though it does get as far as a boat.
Nobody in this book is cruel, and that turns out to be the whole problem.

A life ring hung on the post at the end of that dock the whole time. In the morning its rope was wet and the ring was dry, and in a town where everybody knows everything, somebody on that dock knew one thing more.

Walk down to that dock with Ivy and find the one thing somebody knew.

Ivy Bloom Mysteries, Book Three. It reads perfectly well on its own.