Victoria Trumbull is a feisty ninety-two-year-old who refuses to let her age stop her from having fun—or investigating crime. When Victoria's knowledge of her native Martha's Vineyard helped to solve a murder in Deadly Nightshade, she earned her own baseball cap emblazoned with "West Tisbury Police Deputy." Now the authorities will turn to her again to help uncover another scandal on the idyllic island.

Phoebe Eldridge, a short-tempered

There's more than one reason the new West Tisbury police chief officially made ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull her deputy. For one thing, Victoria knows just about everything about everyone in Martha's Vineyard, not to mention their ancestors. Victoria may be afflicted with the usual aches and pains that descend on nonagenarians—she has a cutoff shoe to accommodate her bunion and a stout stick to help her on her walks across the fields

Cynthia Riggs has no problem making readers believe that her feisty protagonist can be almost indispensable to the new police chief. The years just seem to have sharpened ninety-two-year-old Victoria Trumbull's mind, and she's got an encyclopedic knowledge of her fellow West Tisbury residents and their forebears. But most readers do wonder how the old lady came to be made the chief's official deputy. Author Cynthia Riggs obligingly offers that

Cynthia Riggs draws from a lifetime's intimacy with fabled Martha's Vineyard and its people to create an irresistible series filled with murder and a unique atmosphere.

When Colley Jameson, the unpopular, egocentric editor of the Island Enquirer abruptly cancels Victoria Trumbull's weekly column, the ninety-two-year-old Martha's Vineyard native takes her reporting skills to the competition and immediately outscoops the Enquirer—with