DEATH OF A GINGERBREAD MAN

The return of a deadbeat dad throws a Downeast Maine town into a tizzy.

Hayley Jordan’s father, Dwight, took off from Salmon Cove when she was just a girl, leaving her mother to raise Hayley and her brother, Randy, with no support. Hayley’s best friend Mona’s father, Bubba, stuck around to raise his family, satisfying his need for adventure with a yearly solo ice-fishing trip. But this year, Bubba’s forgotten his blood pressure medication, and when Mona and Hayley drive out to bring it, they get the shock of their lives: Bubba’s excursion isn’t a one-man jaunt after all. For the past few years, he’s invited his old friend Elmer Crawford—the amicably divorced dad of Hayley and Mona’s third best friend, Liddy—and Dwight Jordan, who is kinda-sorta hoping to worm his way back into the bosom of Salmon Cove society. None of these players are spring chickens (Hayley just had her first grandchild), but they react to Dwight’s surprising return the way a bunch of middle schoolers would treat a new kid in town. Some folks see him as the flavor of the month; others are still stung by the way he mistreated them before he left. After a lot of bickering and side-choosing, the stakes go way up when people start getting killed. Carroll Flood is poisoned shortly after losing the town’s gingerbread house contest to Dwight. Then someone starts taking potshots at Dwight. There’s no dearth of suspects who might want to harm him: Hayley assembles a list of more than 100 people he’s hurt. Though ultimately Hayley cracks the case, the biggest mystery is why folks remain so enamored of someone who has done nothing but harm his whole life.

A weird tale of crime without punishment.