Death, Lies, and Apple Pies: A Tori Miracle Mystery

In this sequel to Death Pays the Rose Rent, Manhattan author Tori Miracle returns to Lickin Creek, a small Amish town in Pennsylvania, where she investigates murder again. Controversy surrounding a proposed nuclear waste dump has developed since her last adventure in Lickin Creek. Tori's love interest, police chief Garnet Gochenauer, is caught up in the fight because his widowed sister, who's Tori's oldest friend, heads the opposition to the dump. Tori, on hand when one of the owners of the proposed site is dying, hears the man whisper that he's been poisoned. When the autopsy reports no trace of poison, only Tori is left believing the death was murder. Searching the outlying areas in her effort to prove that the landowner was purposefully killed, she finds a mountain woman who corroborates the poisoning. In her travels, she also stumbles across an abandoned cemetery within the dump site and runs into a nearby marijuana field. Alerting authorities to the field, she becomes a local hero and a target for revenge by the crop's owners. Then the mountain woman is killed, and Tori suffers a series of close calls, making her wonder who her true friends really are. As she and readers learn in this breezy, well-plotted cozy, even small towns can harbor unexpected murderers. (Aug.)