Crafts and Life

Lucy Resnick’s nerves are as tight as a tea cozy. Her new goats, Hot Lips and Gidget, keep making a break for the town square, her truck is dying, and her boyfriend’s gorgeous ex-wife is in town for the holidays. Worse, someone’s digging holes on her land…and uprooting her peach orchard and dewberry patch in the process. Lucy needs additional holiday stress like she needs a blow to the head—which she receives one night, courtesy of the mystery digger.

When the dim-witted sheriff arrests one of Lucy’s best friends, the former reporter puts her own problems on the back burner and starts investigating. What she finds is a patchwork of clues—an injured puppy, a sapphire necklace gone missing, and a string of poison-pen letters—that draws her deep into a web of small-town secrets.

Word travels fast in Buttercup. When the killer learns Lucy’s on the trail, Lucy finds she needs more than her reporting skills to save her friend—she needs a Christmas miracle.

A gentle second book in the series, Karen MacInerney writes about smalltown problems and smalltown people, you don't expect the problems to include murder though!

It is coming up on Christmas but this is not really the season of Joy and Thanksgiving, in Buttercup there is a Christmas fair running, but a new church is trying to get people to boycott this, even though the money is to help a local person get adaptations to her house so she can stay in it. One of Lucy's friends (Molly) has a daughter who has joined that church, mainly because she is going out with the preacher's son. Part way through the week of the fair there is a problem with a fire in a house, what we discover is a) the person renting the house was dead before the fire started and b) there was a black lab puppy who was alive but burned.

Now Molly is worried as her daughter has eloped with the preacher's son, and when she goes to report this to the local sheriff he arrests her for the murder of the woman in the house! Now Lucy needs to put her investigative reporters had back on, ignore the fact that her boyfriend's stunning ex is in town, and find out the truth as Rooster (the sheriff) is not looking at anybody else other than Molly.