Alpine Fury

Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. Especially if you're the editor of a small-town weekly newspaper faced with an unsolved murder and a fast-approaching deadline, as is the case with Emma Lord, heroine of the sixth novel in the Alpine series (after The Alpine Escape). The Pacific Northwest town of Alpine is already suffering from the demise of the logging industry, so when a visitor from the Bank of Washington starts a flurry of rumors that the town's only bank may be heading for a merger, the matter is of special interest to Emma and the staff of the Advocate. Emma investigates, but the matter gets complicated when the bank's bookkeeper, daughter of its owner, is murdered. Emma is joined in her search by Vida Runkel, her best friend and house-and-garden editor. Vida is also a gossip, a valuable commodity in a small town, and Emma is barely able to keep up as Vida weaves her way through the intricate relationships of Alpine's denizens to ferret out the information needed to solve the case. The book's small-town ambiance makes a good contrast to this high-finance, very '80s mystery. The town's quirky characters, from the millionaire who wants to form citizen detective teams to the sheriff who wants to become more cultured, add a nice, honest feel to the tale. (Dec.)