Our heroine stumbles onto murder the first week of her return; cajoled into participating in the small-town's annual Chokeberry Days Festival, she discovers the corpse of the festival's celebrity guest: a Chicago children's television hostess named Mrs. Gumtree, who's played by an actress and former Scrumble River native named Honey Adair. The shapely Honey was once the high school bad girl; so more than one former classmate has a motive for bumping her off. When Skye's hairdresser brother is tagged by the police as prime suspect, she takes it on herself to uncover the actual killer's identity.

Swanson divides her book between Skye's travails at home and on the job (Swanson herself has worked as a school psychologist and she clearly has the details down) - and her first foray into amateur sleuthing. She's especially strong on the family stuff, Skye's tension-packed relationship with her farm wife mother May, in particular. Ma also works nights as the town's police dispatcher, which gives Skye an inside connection to the local constabulary that I'm guessing becomes even more prominent as the series progresses.

Our heroine solves the mystery, of course - though not without first placing herself in some unconvincing peril - and takes what could be the tentative start of a series romance with the town's coroner Simon Reid. Not surprisingly, that last starts rockily, with Skye bridling because Simon reminds her of her ex-fiancé. Along the way we get perhaps too much info about the politics of school counseling plus amusing material on farm town events and the incestuous nature of small-town power structures. As a guide to all this, Skye provides an aptly iconoclastic set of eyes and ears, and I wouldn't mind returning to Scrumble River with her in the future. It's about an hour drive, we're told, from Kankakee, so I'm figuring it's maybe a good hour-and-a-half jaunt from Bloomington-Normal. . .