MURDER UNDER THE COVERED BRIDGE

The notorious ladies of the Summer Ridge Bridge Club are in trouble again.

The group of sprightly seniors became well-known when they found a dead body while pursuing one of the items on their bucket list—skinny-dipping. Joy McQueen has landed a job as a reporter on a local station, with stints on Good Morning America, but Charlotte Reinholdt and Francine McNamara are the group’s supersleuths. Joy is using Francine on her TV spot about the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival to tell the story of Francine’s great-grandmother, whose illicit affair with the family coachman began on the Roseville Bridge. The whole group is staying in a house in nearby Rockville helping a bridge buddy, Mary Ruth Burrows, a Food Network veteran who’s running a dessert shop at the festival, as they take the opportunity to cross another item off Charlotte’s bucket list: appearing in racy pictures. Today Francine and her husband, Jonathan, are dressing up and posing as her great-grandmother and her lover for the last in the series of photos which the ladies plan to make into a calendar. The photo shoot is disturbed when shots ring out and a man races out of a cornfield and tumbles down the creek bank near the bridge. The victim is Francine’s distant cousin William, who, with his wife, Dolly, owns a string of nursing homes in the area. He’s carrying a vial of what looks like water and the diary of Francine’s great-grandmother. When William unexpectedly dies in the hospital, Charlotte resolves to find out what happened, and Francine becomes involved because the answer seems to lie in her great-grandmother’s past.

The second in this series (Murder on the Bucket List, 2015) spices up Perona’s usual cozy recipe with a little fantasy.