A Drunkard’s Path: A Someday Quilts Mystery

Nell Fitzgerald, a 26-year-old New Yorker who’s made a new life for herself in the Hudson River town of Archers Rest, looks into two murders in O’Donohue’s artful second quilting mystery (after 2008’s The Lover’s Knot ): that of Lily Harmon, a young woman found floating in the Hudson’s icy waters, and that of Sandra Thomas, an art student whose strangled corpse turns up two feet from Nell’s back door. The abrasive Sandra may have been having an affair with her teacher, Oliver White, a notorious womanizer and former drunk, who Nell suspects is the killer. Meanwhile, Nell and her quilting group worry about the romance developing between Oliver and Eleanor Cassidy, Nell’s quilt shop–owner grandmother. Despite a warning from her new boyfriend, Archers Rest’s police chief, Nell throws herself into the investigation, which also draws the attention of a nearby town’s police chief. O’Donohue deftly weaves clever crime-solving with valuable quilting tips. (Sept.)