WED AND BURIED

Computer programmer and new mother Laura Fleming (Tight as a Tick, 1997, etc.) has arrived in Byerly, North Carolina, with her Shakespearean husband Richard and adorable—everyone says so, all the time—seven-month-old Alice for a wedding reception for her aunt Maggie Burnette. It seems Aunt Maggie, well into her seventh decade, has upped and married the town’s wealthiest bachelor, Big Bill Walters. The nuptials surprise the bourgeois Burnettes and shock the wealthy Walterses, but it turns out that this is a different sort of shotgun wedding: Someone is trying to murder Big Bill, and Aunt Maggie aims to protect him. Laura and Richard, experienced amateur sleuths in the Nick and Nora mold—minus that couple’s witty dialogue, suspenseful plotting, and frequent consumption of alcohol, since Laura is nursing—agree to snoop around. Before they get very far, however, Big Bill’s champagne toast at the reception is poisoned. The geriatric bridegroom reluctantly reveals that he suspects his son Burt, who’s never received the affection from his father that he craves, and who’s recently begun an intense relationship with a younger man named Mike. But Big Bill has made plenty of nonfamily enemies in his career, too, and Laura faithfully investigates the assortment of victims and crackpots who hate him, including a possible old lover of Aunt Maggie’s who’s stalking the elderly newlyweds. Eventually, between marital simpering and parental diaper changes, the killer is apprehended.

Readers may vote for an Aunt Maggie mystery next, since the older woman seems a lot more interesting than her shallow niece.