Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody by Barbara Ross

Jane Darrowfield, Professional Busybody by Barbara Ross

Jane Darrowfield is a year into her retirement, and she's already traveled and planted a garden. She's organized her photos, her recipes, and her spices. The statistics suggest she has at least a few more decades ahead of her, so she better find something to do ...

JANE DARROWFIELD, PROFESSIONAL BUSYBODY

After Jane helps a friend with a sticky personal problem, word starts to spread around her bridge club--and then around all of West Cambridge, Massachusetts--that she's the go-to girl for situations that need discreet fixing. Soon she has her first paid assignment--the director of a 55-and-over condo community needs her to de-escalate hostilities among the residents. As Jane discovers after moving in for her undercover assignment, the mature set can be as immature as any high schoolers, and war is breaking out between cliques.

It seems she might make some progress--until one of the aging popular kids is bludgeoned to death with a golf club. And though the automatic sprinklers have washed away much of the evidence, Jane's on course to find out whodunit ...

The Maine Clambake Mysteries are written by Barbara Ross. Clammed Up, the first book in the series, was a nominee for the Maine Literary Prize for Crime Fiction and was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel, the RT Book Reviews Reviewer's Choice Best Book Award for Amateur Detective, and was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. She is the co-editor and co-publisher of Level Best Books, a company that publishes anthologies of mystery stories by New England authors.