A barn full of cherry blossoms, a wedding in five days, and a best man who won't be giving his toast.Tess Lindqvist ran ballrooms in Chicago for seventeen years, until a merger found it had one events director too many. So she did the sensible thing: she bought a derelict cherry-orchard barn on a Wisconsin peninsula from a listing photograph with snow on the roof, and turned it into a wedding venue. The Halvorsen Barn's first booking is the biggest wedding Sorrel Bay has seen in a decade. If it goes well, the barn books its summer. If it doesn't, Tess learns how to sell a barn in a town where everyone knows what happened in it.Then, on the morning after the rehearsal dinner, the best man is found dead in the old cider room, at the foot of a ladder he had no business climbing, with a bottle of the groom's gin beside his hand. The county calls it a fall. Tess, who counts everything, knows the room is telling a story, and that somebody arranged it.The bride's family is co-op royalty and wants the wedding postponed. The groom's mother, warm, organized, and magnificent in a crisis, says Saturday, and the wedding goes on. And Tess has four days, a seating chart she saved in four versions, a rehearsal-dinner log with one untouched plate on it, and a goose named Hilda who only honks at one door.Because a seating chart doesn't lie. It's the one document at a wedding where everybody tells the truth.Something Borrowed, Somebody Dead is the first Sorrel Bay Mystery: a small-town cozy with a supper-club relish tray, a slow-burn conservation warden, a peninsula that never forgives anybody, and a venue that books its own suspects. Each book is one event and one body, and the door is always open for the next. Recipes included.
