The Madison Three

Between two lakes, on a narrow neck of Wisconsin, sits a small city that thinks of itself as a small town - friendly, tidy, and, like every place Elliot Wren visits, hiding a body or two beneath the good manners. Three linked novellas, one long winter, and a detective who has seen enough of this town not to ask every question out loud.

In What Came Back to the Prairie, ecologist Frankie Lindqvist finds a beloved colleague dead the morning after the autumn burn - the keeper of the Arboretum's records, struck down with her life's work stolen from her arms. The easy answer is a fall in the dark. But the missing papers point somewhere Frankie doesn't want to look: toward the founding of the prairie itself, and one of its most revered names.

In The First-Ice Watch, the old man who spent his life recording Lake Mendota's freezes is found dead by his pier, and the town is content to call it a bad heart on a cold night. Cora Vandehei knows better. She knows who killed him - and she cannot prove it, or even say it aloud, without unraveling a thirty-year-old secret that protecting the wrong person will cost a family everything.

In The Keepers of Foolishness, a rigid city attorney turns up dead on the frozen lake, and the obvious suspect is the cheerful oddball whose winter stunt drew him out onto the ice. Augie Toscano has four days, one increasingly nosy detective, and a very good reason to solve this himself before the whole city gathers on that same lake and the truth comes up with them.

Warm, wry, and quietly strange, the Good Neighbors Mysteries are for readers who love a puzzle with a beating heart - where the crime is human, the motive is closer to home than anyone wants, and the neighbors are keeping more than one kind of secret.