TINE TO LIVE, A TINE TO DIE

An organic farmer has a lot more than crop failure to worry about.

Cam Flaherty took over her uncle’s farm after losing her job. Now that she’s switched to organic produce, she’s off to a good start, with quite a few people signed up for weekly produce shares, a stand at a local farmer’s market and a chef eager to buy her food. Even though she’s overwhelmed with work, Cam is forced to fire Mike Montgomery, the sullen son of a local farmer, when she finds him bringing pesticides onto her property. Her shareholders and members of the locavore group that buy her products pitch in to help, but things go from bad to worse when Mike is found dead with Cam’s pitchfork through his neck. The police arrest Lucinda DaSilva, one of her helpers, but Cam, unable to believe that she’s guilty, decides to do some sleuthing on her own. Her former childhood friend is a police officer whose husband is involved in a local group of bigots who are trying to discover undocumented foreigners living in the area. Besides Lucinda, whose status is in doubt, several other people, some of them longtime residents, may be undocumented, including Cam’s new love interest, Jake Ericsson, a Swedish chef, and a Polish businessman whose daughter helps Cam at the farm while earning a Girl Scout badge. Will Cam find the killer before her business vanishes?

The first in a planned series offers plenty of organic gardening lore, characters too nice to kill anyone and a mystery guaranteed not to keep you up at night.