MEADOWLARK

Lark Dodge opens a new incarnation of her Larkspur bookstore just in time to get bullied into running a writers' workshop for her neighbor Bianca Fiedler, while an unscheduled murder is due to round out the proceedings. The workshop is high-concept—the topic is sustainable agriculture, about which Bianca and her folklorist/farmer husband Keith McDonald are formidably knowledgeable—but the murder isn't. In fact, the proper response to the bludgeoning death of Hugo Groth, Meadowlark's master gardener, seems to be mourning rather than detection—especially when his obsequies are preceded by the disappearance of a student protÇgÇ of another Meadowlark manager and a suspicious accident involving two more students. Pushy Bianca, ever intent on keeping her conference going whatever the obstacles, is a memorable piece of work, but the rest of the large cast is as forgettable as their secrets: Lark and her cop/professor husband Jay are muffled, and the whole mystery plot has a much more half-hearted air than the forthright excursus on bookselling, clear-cutting, and sustainable agriculture. Lark's fourth case (after Mudlark, 1993, etc.) makes murder seem an intruder not only in the writers' workshop, but in the novel as well.