To look at her, one would never think suburbanite homemaker Jane Jeffry would be interested in murder and mayhem. But given the corpses she’s come across she’s practically an expert on the subject. Which is why Jane’s booking down to a nearby mystery writers’ convention to mingle with the brightest lights of literary crime, and maybe drum up some interest in her own recently completed manuscript. But when a famous ego-squashing editor keels over at the speaker’s podium, and a much-hated book-bashing journalist is himself bashed in the parking lot, it seems fairly certain that at least one real-life murderer is stalking the proceedings. Jane Jeffry is on the case, ready to snoop, eavesdrop, and gossip her way to a solution.

March 3, 1933, the day before Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration. Siblings Lily and Robert Brewster have agreed to help out at a nursing home next door to their own cottage, dubbed Grace & Favor. The convalescent home is full of colorful characters, including a cantankerous old man named Sean Connor. The day the Brewsters arrive, he slips into a coma and dies. No one is surprised at his passing–until it’s revealed that he’s been murdered. And Mr. Connor isn’t the only victim in town. With multiple murders plaguing the community, the Brewster siblings are more committed than ever to helping the police find a cold-blooded criminal before he strikes again.

Agatha Award winner Jill Churchill has delighted fans for years with her Jane Jeffry mysteries. Jane is finally getting married to longtime boyfriend Mel, who’s convinced her and her best friend Shelley to take a self-defense class. But when two people in the class are murdered, all thoughts of learning karate are put on hold. And of course, there’s still that pesky matter of a wedding to plan.

For sister and brother Lily and Robert Brewster and the rest of Hudson Valley, the dark days of the Depression mean deprivation all around. Their poor town has lost its post office and now the mail gets dumped at the train station. When Robert helps a young widow haul her newly arrived German grandfather’s trunks home, he thinks he may have found a new set of friends. But when a swastika is found painted on the widow’s window, and the train porter is found dead, Robert and Lily know that something much deeper, and much darker, has moved into their sleepy little town.