The unsolved murders at a remote Wisconsin farmhouse half a century ago have receded into time. But one deranged man will do anything to make sure that all of Pepin County remembers that bloody day.
When a quantity of dangerous pesticides is stolen from the local co-op, Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins is called in to investigate. The thief has left one bizarre clue: the finger bone of a child long dead.
The pesticides soon reappear with devastating effect - in flowerbeds, in animal feed, and in a fatal concoction at a Fourth of July picnic. Each time, a tiny human bone is left at the scene. With the help of Harold Peabody, the quirky, aging editor of the Durand Daily, Claire unravels the secrets of the past, leading her to a pair of young lovers, a man enraged over his mother's death, an obsessive recluse, and the deputy who first discovered the corpses of the Schuler family. Claire desperately races against time to find the madman before he uses the lethal pesticide again. But he won't be stopped. Not until he gets what he wants.
Joyce Bean employs a narrative style, even in dialogue, as she methodically develops characters and creates a link between a fifty-year-old murder and the present-day theft of toxic pesticides by a perpetrator who intends to poison the water supply of a Wisconsin farming community. Logue gives us a heroine who works the small town police procedural with marked efficiency; Bean gives us her voice through a miasma of clues that unmask both the killer and the legacy of the unsolved crime. Bean maintains the energy of the plot throughout and then expertly captures the tension when Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins, in a voice so eerily calm it's impossible not to hold your breath, confronts the unmasked killer. K.A.T. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
Mary Logue is the author of the acclaimed Claire Watkins mystery series, including most recently Bone Harvest. An award-winning poet, she lives with writer Pete Hautman in the Wisconsin bluff country, the setting for the Watkins novels.
