PAST DUE FOR MURDER

A library director’s past and present lovers are the leading suspects in a case of murder.

Amy Webber has been helping university lecturer and folklorist Mona Raymond research legends about fairies, missing girls, hidden gold, and mysterious lights from the Blue Ridge Mountain area, where Amy lives with her aunt. Mona is telling stories at a Girl Scout bonfire when Charles Bartos, a pianist, composer, and professor at nearby Clarion University who’d stolen Amy’s heart and then dumped her, suddenly appears. Mona lashes out at him, accusing him of stealing her research for one of his compositions. Charles had recently returned to the house he built in the mountains after the woman who replaced Amy was killed in a hit-and-run. Now Lacey Jacobs, one of Mona’s students, has suddenly vanished, and her friends are concerned. Amy’s worried about her current love interest, Richard Muir, a talented dancer and choreographer who’s suddenly become distant after working with Lacey in one of his classes. Richard was apparently the last person to see Lacey, who’d run from his office in tears. When the police look for Lacey, they find her in bad shape next to the body of Mona, who’s in even worse shape after being shot. Amy, who has a good relationship with the police (Shelved Under Murder, 2018, etc.), can’t believe that either Charles or Richard is a murderer. So she uses her sleuthing and research talents to determine who else might have it in for the two women. With Lacey in a coma and her relationship in danger, Amy uses every connection she can work and puts herself in mortal peril searching for the truth.

A basic cozy-cum-romance that would have benefited from judicious pruning.