Sometimes it didn't even take a crisis: Dad came home drunk and beat the living shit out of his wife and children, or a husband arrived home early from work to his heavily mortgaged abode and found his wife in bed with another man. The veneer of civilization, so essential to daily life, could easily be dissolved by crisis. These were the joys of a small town, yet they masked the same problems and pain, the same cruelties, injustice, and self-destructive behavior found on a larger scale in Charlottesville, fourteen miles to the east, or Richmond, seventy miles beyond Charlottesville.

Crozet folks laughed at their neighbors' habits, predicting who would say what to whom and when. How close it made everyone feel, these little monikers, these tokens of intimacy, nicknames. The Marilyn Sanburnes, senior and junior, were Big Marilyn, or Mim, and Little Marilyn respectively. Cabell Hall, president of the Allied National Bank in Richmond, was Cab or Cabby his wife of twenty-seven years, Florence, was dubbed Taxi. She was Harry, and Peter Shiflett, who owned the market next door, was called Market. Olivia was BoomBoom, and Pharamond was Fair. Harry mused that everyone in town had nicknames. Even if she wanted Fair back, which she most certainly did not, he was embroiled in a romance with BoomBoom Craycroft, the beautiful thirty-two-year-old widow of Kelly Craycroft. Larry Johnson, the retired, widowed town doctor, who was two years older than God, and the other, of course, was Pharamond Haristeen.

Her friends ransacked their address books for the names of eligible bachelors. Her divorce from Fair had been final six months ago, or was it a year? She really couldn't remember, or perhaps she didn't want to remember. Autumn colors remained in her memory, and this would be that kind of fall. Oak trees transformed into orange torches, the maples turned blood-red, and the beech trees became yellow, then as now. At Crozet High she had worn a fuzzy red sweater one long-ago October day, in 1973 to be exact, and caught the eye of Fair Haristeen. Much as Harry loathed cold weather, she liked having to buy a new sweater or two. George Avenue, seen from the alleyway behind the post office.īrilliant fall days brought back memories of hotly contested football games, school crushes, and cool nights. The long October rays of the sun gilded the large trotting-horse weathervane on Miranda Hogendobber's house on St. Murphy, Harry's tiger cat, and Tee Tucker, her corgi, roused themselves from a drowsy afternoon slumber to accompany her. Harry was so compelled by the quality of the light that she threw on her denim jacket and walked out the back door. The rooftops shone the simple clapboard buildings were lent a pleasing grace. It seemed to her as if the entire town had been drenched in butter. Mary Minor Haristeen looked up from the envelopes she was sorting and then walked over to the large glass window to admire the view. Golden light poured over the little town of Crozet, Virginia. only to find themselves a whisker away from becoming the killer's next victims. Murphy, her friend Tucker, and her human companion Harry begin to sort throughout the clues. No one knows who the dead man is, but when a grisly clue makes a spectacular appearance in the middle of the fall festivities, more than an early winter snow begins chilling the blood of Crozet's very best people. Could his one little imperfection be that he's a killer? Blair becomes the most likely suspect when the pieces of a dismembered corpse begin tuming up around Crozet. Murphy, and her Welsh Corgi, Tee Tucker, believe he smells A-okay. When Blair Bainbridge comes to Crozet, Virginia, the local matchmakers lose no time in declaring him perfect for their newly divorced postmistress, Marry Minor 'Harry Haristeen.' Even Harry's tiger cat, Ms. Small towns don't take kindly to strangers-unless the stranger happens to be a drop-dead gorgeous and seemingly unattached male. Murphy thinks the new man in town is the cat's meow.

Rest in pieces