MURDER IN THE ROUGH

English teacher/inadvertent homicide sleuth Sarah Deane (Coup de Grace, 2000, etc.) once again finds herself surrounded by bodies, this time while visiting her husband Alex’s parents, John and Elspeth, in their new digs at Maine’s Ocean Tide leisure community. Jason Colley, the first victim, is strangled with a bicycle chain just off the putting green. Then Ned, his dad, is found buried under massive fertilizer bags in a groundskeeper’s shed. Resort manager Joseph Martinelli is beside himself, particularly when the cops close the golf course, residents’ bicycles keep disappearing, and a trusted staff member suddenly decamps for Paris. Meanwhile, as she’s walking Patsy, the family Irish wolfhound, Sarah stumbles on another body, her father-in-law’s irascible nonagenarian uncle Fergus, niblicked to death in a sand trap. Then young Dylan Colley disappears in the fog. Sarah finds him, loses him again, and ultimately winds up trussed beside him in a greenhouse basement. They escape, the bad ’uns are caught, and Alex’s parents decide the leisure life is not for them and move out of Ocean Tide.

Dopey plotting, cranky characters, but lavish detail about the accoutrements of $5,000 bicycles.