CLOSE KNIT KILLER

Fort Connor gets its collective knickers in a knot when a con man returns to the Colorado town after serving his time.

Jared Rizzoli’s Ponzi scheme casts a broad net, ruining many lives. Indigent Malcolm lost his home, his wife and his money in Rizzoli’s scam. Barbara, one of the spinners at Mimi Shafer’s House of Lambspun, lost her dad, a financial planner who killed himself when he discovered that Rizzoli had lost all of his clients’ money. So when Rizzoli turns up dead in Mimi’s driveway, the police don’t think they have far to look for the killer. Accountant Kelly Flynn (Cast On, Kill Off, 2012, etc.), who shares the yarn shop’s driveway, thinks otherwise and starts to hunt for alternatives to the cops’ prime suspect. But her sleuthing is interrupted by an emergency: Good friend Pete Wainwright’s father, Ben, is hospitalized in Denver after a heart attack, leaving his niece Cassie without a guardian. As Pete and his girlfriend, Jennifer, prepare a home for Cassie in Fort Connor, Kelly, Mimi, physical therapist Lisa Gerrard and alpaca rancher Jayleen Swinson all pitch in to provide activities to ease the 11-year-old’s transition to small-town life. Like no adolescent on Earth, Cassie proves sweet, amenable and interested in everything, leaving Kelly plenty of time to track down the real culprit in Rizzoli’s murder.

Once again, the Lambspun gang shows the power of friendship and fiber arts to triumph over greed and self-interest.