FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND

Actress/baker Piper Donovan (The Look of Love, 2012, etc.) travels to Sarasota for another homicide-laced wedding at the best beach in America.

Piper has been chosen as maid of honor by her cousin Kathy Leeds, who’s marrying Dan Clemens of the Mote Marine Lab. But it’s impossible for the bridal couple to hold center stage when they’re competing with so many corpses. The first victim is Shelley Hart, Kathy’s colleague at the Whispering Sands Inn, whose murderer buries her in the sand and tells Levi Fisher, an Amish teen who caught him in the act, that he’ll kill Levi’s sister Miriam if he doesn’t keep mum. The second is Levi, who hangs himself and leaves behind a suicide note confessing to the murder rather than condemning Miriam to unending threats. He’s followed the same night by Jo-Jo Williams, an observant cocktail waitress whose brief stint as a blackmailer comes to a predictably swift end. The police assume that Levi is the killer, both before and after his death. But Clark duly implicates Dan’s best man, Brad O’Hara, a kayak concessionaire with a troubled past; Levi’s uncle Isaac Goode, the Whispering Sands wedding planner who’s been shunned by the Amish ever since renouncing his faith; and developer Walter Engel, whose bare-knuckled tactics for expanding the Whispering Sands strike some homeowners as uncomfortably menacing.

The behavior of both the killer and the hapless Levi, who falsely confesses to the murder but leaves behind a cryptic clue to the real miscreant, defy belief, but fans of Clark’s more famous ex-mother-in-law will be pleased to see that the line distinguishing the two has virtually disappeared.