Murder by Gravity

November 1, 2014
Tony Abernathy, sheriff of tiny Park County, Tennessee, has just been reelected, but a very bad day the week before Halloween almost makes him resign. A freak snowstorm brings the usual array of traffic mishaps, followed by the discovery of four skeletons in a root cellar, a report of a woman walking around the grocery store with a knife in her back, a stolen coffin complete with body, and a report from Orvan Lundy of hearing a haint. This time Lundy is right. There was a scream, and a body did fall from the sky. Abernathy and his deputies trek into a mountainside clearing to find the body of Franklin Cashdollar, a retired colonel from North Carolina and brother to both the village mayor and Tony's friend Carl Lee Cashdollar. While Tony is pursuing leads in Cashdollar's death, his wife, Theo, is hosting a quilt show at her shop, and the rarest of the quilts disappears. As in prior entries in the delightful series, Theo's quilt shop is gossip central, making her crucial in solving the mystery. Clues to a mystery quilt included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)