Glazed Grudges

A whole town heard Greta Marsh. Not one of them believed her.

For four years, Greta Marsh has told anyone who would listen that her husband's hunting accident was murder. For four years, Prairie Rose has said poor Greta, and said it kindly, and changed the subject.

Then Greta walks into Russ Yates's taxidermy shop on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and says it louder than she ever has, with Jackie Prescott standing three feet away. By the next morning, Greta Marsh is dead.

Someone caught the argument on video. By lunch, the whole town has decided the quiet man with the turquoise storefront and the terrible slogan killed her. His parking lot empties. Somebody paints a word on his front glass in the night. And Jackie, who spent twenty-five years watching juries convict people before the evidence ever showed up, has had enough of it.

What she and Lauren find underneath the gossip is worse than a grudge. A loader operator drinking himself to death over what he helped bury out on the ridge. A developer who knows every wife's name in town and pays for lunch with bills too big to be a kindness. And an envelope Greta mailed to herself, four years in the making, holding the proof her husband died for.

There are families living in those houses. There are children.

With Ray working the case from the inside, Melody running the forensics from College Station, and a town that has already made up its mind twice, Jackie and Lauren have to prove what a dead woman spent four years failing to make anybody hear. Before whoever silenced Greta comes back to finish the job.

In Prairie Rose, the deadliest thing anybody ever said about Greta Marsh was nothing at all.

The seventh installment in the Burnt Ends Mystery series serves up a cold case, a town's worst instincts, and one man who deserved better from all of them.