GONE BUT NOT FOR GARDEN

An Indiana private eye’s first paying case draws on her personal connections but threatens her perspective on her placid small-town community.

Athena Spencer is working at Bloomers Flower Shop, her family’s floral business in Sequoia, a town near Lake Michigan, when she’s approached by a stranger looking for help. Abby Knight Salvare and her husband, Marco, run a private detective agency in New Chapel, Indiana, and they’ve got a case for the Goddess of Greene Street, which is what local papers have dubbed Athena based on her sleuthing abilities. Abby wants to hire Athena’s Greene Street Detective Agency to look into a murder during the final night of the Small Business Association’s fashion show. Carly Blackburn, one of the locals acting as a model in the show, was poisoned, and the accused, Abby’s cousin, Jillian Ophelia Knight Osborne, is adamant she had nothing to do with the crime. Because of the fundraising nature of the event, the other attendees—that is, suspects—are also Sequoia movers and shakers, from Fran Decker, owner of Fabulous Fashions, to Mayor Charles E. Sloan himself. Abby is sure that Athena’s personal connections could help push the investigation beyond the limited information she’s been able to collect. And Athena’s thrilled to be working her first official investigation with Case Donnelly, her partner in and out of the office. But her ability to get people talking gives her an unwelcome, unflattering view of her town friends, and she’s not sure she’ll be able to go back even after the killer’s identified.

A middling mystery that does what it should but not much more.