Toni L. P. Kelner

In the first in Agatha Award-winning author Toni L. P. Kelner’s smart, witty mystery series, amateur sleuth Laura Fleming finds her trip going South—in lethal ways…

They say you can’t go home again, and Laura Burnette Fleming thinks they may have a point. Moving to Boston has made her a bona fide Yankee in the eyes of her Byerly, North Carolina family. Yet Laura—forever Laurie Anne to her kin—still rushes back to see her ailing grandpa.

Paw is in a bad way, rousing just long enough to tell Laura he didn’t fall—he was attacked—before passing away. Why would anyone harm the beloved Burnette patriarch? True, the family has its share of issues lately, from Aunt Nellie’s doomed get-rich-quick schemes to Aunt Edna’s fixation with the local pastor. But surely not even the grasping cousins slyly sizing up Paw’s possessions could commit murder.

With the aid of her Shakespearean scholar husband, Richard, and her indomitable great-aunt Maggie, Laura confronts a slew of family secrets. Turns out Paw may have seen something that a killer is determined to keep quiet. And Laura will have to untangle the truth, before this homecoming leads to another homicide…