The Bee Balm Murders: A Martha's Vineyard Mystery

At the start of Riggs's beguiling 10th Martha's Vineyard mystery (after 2010's Touch-Me-Not), beekeeper Sean McBride, who tends the seven hives in 92-year-old Victoria Trumbull's west pasture, refers a new boarder to her%E2%80%94entrepreneur Orion Nanopoulos. The genial Orion, who pays without protest about double the usual rate for an attic room with no TV in Victoria's comfortably ramshackle West Tisbury house, heads a project to lay fiber-optic cables across the island. After his main prospective investor, Brooklyn construction tycoon Angelo Vulpone, turns up dead in a work ditch, the victim's family hires Victoria to investigate, while Orion contends with the confidence artists circling vulture-like around his project's newly gaping financial shortfall. Scenes set off-island may lack the convincing detail of those on the Vineyard, but the author's charismatic heroine and assured prose more than compensate. (May)