Post Facto

Former newspaper columnist Clara Buchanan, the heroine of this entertaining mystery from Wimberley (Devil’s Slew), has returned home to Laureate, Fla., to run the Clarion, “the smallest newspaper in northern Florida.” Two years into that underappreciated campaign, she encounters a series of bizarre stories straight out of The X-Files. Babs Stanton claims to have seen her husband, a U.S. senator, smoking a cigar, years after he was killed in an explosion. Second grader Jenny O’Steen, who vanished after an altercation at the local candy store, later surfaces to report that a little man covered in grasslike fur helped her recover from insulin shock. Meanwhile, even as those oddities remain unexplained, Clara learns that local bully Hiram Lamb, who the reader knows will be killed at some point, has resorted to threats to get his foster brother, Butch McCray, to sell him the candy store so that Lamb can use the property to land a multimillion-dollar federal grant. A plausible depiction of small-town life enhances the offbeat plot. (Dec.)