BINDWEED

A small-town florist must dig deeper than ever to discover who killed a mentally challenged young man, and why.

Before she died, Agnes Sutton provided for her son Toby, whose brain functioned like a child’s because of oxygen deprivation at birth. She’d arranged for the owners of many of the shops along River City’s Hawthorne Street to hire Toby to do chores, assuring him of useful employment as well as a modest income. And Toby carried them out faithfully, washing windows at Bretta Solomon’s flower shop, taking out trash at Scent-Sational, Melba Cameron’s candle shop, and doing odd jobs at Merry’s Delights, the Barkers’ bakery. So why would anyone rig a hornet’s nest inside Toby’s bedroom, guaranteeing he’d be stung to death? Bretta suspects his murder is connected to another of Agnes’s legacies: mysterious flowers she’d planted in her garden that someone found valuable enough to steal. And she’s intrigued enough to put her romance with Bailey Monroe on hold while she investigates. But before Bretta can figure out how missing posies could provoke a deadly booby-trap, River City’s premier amateur sleuth (Reap a Wicked Harvest, 2004, etc.) must deal with her father’s newfound mania for interior design—and for 30-something designer Abigail Dupree—as well as Lois and Lew, her bickering assistants.

Intricately interlaced clues make Harrison’s latest a real page-turner, marred only by a lackluster ending.