POPPY DONE TO DEATH

Quicker than you can say “Dewey Decimal,” librarian Aurora (“Roe”) Teagarden (Last Scene Alive, 2002, etc.) is awash in her shirttail relations’ problems.

The trouble begins when her teenaged half-brother Phillip arrives at Roe’s front door hours after she’s found her stepsister-in-law, Poppy, murdered just inside Poppy’s backdoor. Roe always thought Poppy’s marriage to her brother-in-law, John David Queensland, passing strange, since both partners took lovers faster than her patrons checked out the latest Mary Higgins Clark, leaving behind oodles of possible perpetrators. First are Poppy’s husband’s lovers—realtor Patty Cloud, nurse Linda Pocock Erhardt, and his latest, Romney Burns. Then there are Poppy’s lovers’ wives—Poppy’s swimming-fiend neighbor Cara Embler, Roe’s best friend Lizanne Sewell, and Theresa Stanton, president of Uppity Women, the exclusive club that had just accepted Roe, Poppy, and Melinda Queensland, her third sister-in-law. But most difficult for Roe to contemplate are Poppy’s lovers, since they include not only Lizanne’s prominent lawyer husband Cartland, but her own sometime squeeze, police detective Arthur Smith. Roe springs into action determined to save Arthur from investigating his lover’s murder—stealing time from her new-found obligations to Phillip and her blossoming romance with writer Robin Crusoe to nab a killer who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Lots of suspects, but only one real mystery—which, as usual, involves Roe’s sex life.