Victoria Trumbull, indomitable 92-year-old deputy police officer and poet, investigates smalltown skulduggery in Riggs’s engaging eighth Martha’s Vineyard mystery (after 2007’s Shooting Star
). Along with the dead body of widow Lucy Pease, Victoria finds property cards containing tax information in the home of one of the three town assessors, Ellen Meadows, who’s off island. Knowing these cards should never have left the town hall, Ellen gets on the trail of a skimming scheme involving the assessors and their clerk, Oliver Ashpine. Meanwhile, Victoria learns that Ashpine is threatening to reveal the unsavory past of Delilah Sampson, a flamboyant TV star who owns an island property, if Delilah doesn’t pay her outrageously high property tax. Getting an agricultural “restriction” by turning her property into a farm could be the solution to Delilah’s problem. Once again, Riggs, a 13th-generation Vineyarder, depicts the flaws and foibles of her island characters with sympathy and humor. (May)
