HAMMERS AND HOMICIDE

A small-town hardware store owner turns sleuth when a man is found dead in her shop.

Dawna Carpenter is a widow who talks to her husband and feels his presence, which isn’t surprising, since she had a ghost as a childhood friend. She runs the store in Pine Bluff, Oregon, with the help of Steve Harrison, her only employee, who is uncharacteristically late for work one day. The neighboring store with which Carpenter’s Corner shares a bathroom is a boutique owned by snarky Darlene Lovelace, who, when she runs into Dawna in the hallway, brags about a date she had with Warren Highcastle, the new man in town. Highcastle is planning to turn the old opera house into a hotel, among much controversy, but Darlene calls him “one interesting specimen.” A little while later, Dawna finds Highcastle dead in the shared bathroom, beaten to death with a framing hammer. Police chief J.T. Dallas has a liking for Dawna’s youngest daughter, April, who runs a design and restoration business, but unfortunately his first suspect is Bill Wilder, Dawna’s late husband’s best friend, although Steve—who finally turns up—is a close second. On top of that, Dawna gets a certified letter from a bank she’s never dealt with saying the business owes $25,000. Certain that Bill is not the killer (even though his prints are on the murder weapon), she and April set out to prove it and soon have a list of suspects. A bit of research shows that Highcastle not only had a wife but left a long string of people cheated in crooked real estate deals in his wake.

Scads of red herrings and mixed motives make for a puzzling mystery, never mind the mysterious bank loan.