Murder at the Grange Supper

Forty-one panels of bunting come out of the hat box once a year. One of them is the wrong white.

Brenda Crane spent thirty years telling insurers and auction houses what a piece of cloth really was. Now she runs the Grange hall in Renfrow, Oregon, and the harvest supper is her biggest night of the year: two hundred and forty people, a ham, four urns of coffee, and the one number the county can't argue with when it talks about selling the building.

Then Ardith Jessup, who has run the supper for thirty-one years, is found in the back corridor before the chairs are up.

Within three days the state police have locked Brenda out of her own building, and the town has split down the middle of the parking lot over who did it. There is a developer with a real offer who was seen holding the dead woman's arm. There is a nephew who gets the house. And there is a clipboard in the kitchen with one page gone from it: the night's count.

Brenda can't arrest anybody and doesn't want to. What she has is a panel of bunting that won't take a fold, thirty-one box files in a dead woman's back bedroom, and a growing sense

that everybody in Renfrow knew Ardith for thirty years and nobody ever asked her anything.

Murder at the Grange Supper is book two of the Grange Hall Mysteries: an Oregon timber town, a hall worth saving, a supper held badly rather than not at all, a fair-play puzzle solved in front of the whole town, and a schnauzer who is, once again, no help at all.

Each Grange Hall Mystery is a complete case and can be read on its own, in any order.