Murder at the Book Club

The Willowbrook Wednesday Book Club had survived twenty-three years of literary disagreements, two schisms over the merits of audiobooks, and one very ugly incident involving a spoiler for a bestselling thriller. It had not, until this particular Wednesday, survived a murder. Maeve Callahan discovered the body at precisely 7:15 PM, when she arrived early to arrange the cheese plate and found Gerald Ashton face-down on the reading room carpet with a handmade bookmark protruding from between his fingers.

Gerald had been the club's most polarizing member — a retired insurance adjuster who reviewed every book as though he were assessing it for damages and who had once described Jane Austen as "competent but overvalued." Half the club loathed him. The other half merely tolerated him because he brought excellent wine. The police, when they arrived, seemed unsurprised to learn that the list of people who wished Gerald ill was essentially the club's full membership roster.

Maeve had spent forty years as the town librarian, a profession that required the organizational skills of a general, the diplomacy of an ambassador, and the observational capacity of a detective. She noticed, as the police apparently did not, that Gerald's reading glasses were folded neatly on the table rather than on his face, that the book he had been reading was one the club was not scheduled to discuss forthree weeks, and that the bookmark — hand-pressed with dried flowers — was the exact style made by only one person in Willowbrook. The question was not who had the motive. Everyone had the motive. The question was who had the botanical expertise.