Grub-And-Stakers

Anyone growing up in Lobelia Falls is taught to learn the elegant, ancient, and occasionally deadly art of shooting with a bow and arrow. Practicing the craft, freelance secretary Dittany Henbit is strolling through the woods with her bow at her side when she meets a surveyor making surveys where he shouldn't. Dittany is giving him what, for when an arrow goes whizzing above her head. It is sharp enough to kill and was not fired by accident, but Dittany wasn't the target. She and the surveyor find Mr. Architrave, the head of the water department, not far away-lying dead beneath the trees that he loved so much. Progress is coming to Lobelia Falls, and one resident will do anything to stop it. But in a town where every child can shoot, how can Dittany discover who drew the killer bow?

When the seeds of a mystery are planted, gardening club member Dittany Henbit digs up clues in the cozy series from the internationally bestselling author. The Grub-and-Stakers gardening club has traditionally limited its activities to serving tea and gossiping about wildflowers, but when water department supervisor John Architrave is found murdered in the woods, club member Dittany Henbit turns to solving mysteries. After Architrave's will reveals that he bequeathed his ramshackle old house to the Grub-and-Stakers, with instructions for it to be turned into a museum, Dittany resigns herself to weeks of cleaning out the mansion and sorting through donated town "artifacts." The task turns interesting, however, the minute bodies start falling from the sky. The new curator is airing out the house's attic when he takes his tumble off the roof. So unlikely is it that he would fall out the tiny attic window, that Dittany has no choice but to attempt to add one captured killer to the young museum's permanent collection.

The curtains almost close on an actor in this cozy gardening club mystery featuring amateur sleuth Dittany Henbit and her husband, Osbert Monk. When Jenson Thorbisher-Freep announces an amateur theatrical contest, the women in the Grub-and-Stake gardening club race to join in. They enlist Osbert Monk as their playwright-not only is he married to their club leader Dittany Monk, but he's famous the world over as Lex Laramie, bestselling novelist of Westerns. Taking the legend of Dangerous Dan McGrew as his inspiration, Osbert delivers a rough draft faster than the Pony Express. Now all the Grub-and-Stakers have to do is cast it. To play McGrew, Dittany picks town cad Andrew McNaster, who has recently improved his manners in an attempt to woo Osbert's aunt, Arethusa. The gunslinger's performance gets a bit too real on opening night, though, when his prop bullets are replaced with real ones, and claim the toe of a fellow thespian. Is McNaster as nice as he pretends to be? Or has he taken his part too close to heart, and decided to become very dangerous indeed?

When word gets out that Dittany Monk, the sleuthing gardener of Lobelia Falls, is expecting twins, every knitter in town races to Miss Jane Fuzzywuzzy's Yarnery to begin work on a complete wardrobe of hats, booties, and tiny sweaters. One customer, however, has even more urgent business: the man with the gunshot wounds in his back. The victim stumbles out of a bullet-ridden car, dripping blood all over the freshly cleaned sidewalk, and dies with a peculiar phrase on his lips: "The raveled sleeve!" Before Miss Jane can offer advice on how to rescue an unraveling sweater, her unfortunate customer expires. To ensure her twins can be raised in a safe hometown, Dittany will have to get the yarn-store murder sewn up.

A widowed gardener meets a ghost from frontier times who's out for revenge Zilla Trott is pouring her cat some chamomile tea when the drifter appears in her kitchen. He is grubby and crude-not at all the kind of person you'd usually find in the pleasant town of Lobelia Falls-but something about him intrigues the aging widow. Perhaps it's his rugged good looks, or the way he seems to come from another time and place. Or perhaps it's the fact that he's been dead for nearly a century. When Lobelia Falls was in its rough-and-tumble frontier infancy, Hiram Jellyby was the best mule driver the town had ever seen, until an argument over a hidden cache of gold left him bleeding to death in a back alley. He returns in spectral form to secure a proper burial, and finds that in modern-day Lobelia Falls, no one knows more about turning the soil than Zilla Trott's gardening buddies-all members of Dittany Monk's fearless Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club.