Some men are too good to be true. At Havenmere, that isn't a compliment.
At Havenmere Country Club, the fairways are flawless, the funerals are catered, and everyone agrees it is a marvelous place to spend the years one has left. Eighty-five-year-old Sylvia Stern has spent fourteen winters here, long enough to know that the nicer a thing looks, the harder someone is working to keep you from looking closer.
Then Warren Deitch dies. Everyone adored Warren; charming, attentive, wonderful with the widows, the kind of man who handled your money without a single unpleasant question. On a Wednesday in January, his heart simply stopped, and Havenmere buried a marvelous man with a lovely service and a tear or two that were almost certainly sincere.
Everyone grieves. Sylvia takes notes.
Armed with the notebook her late husband called her murder book, a best friend who hears everything, and a detective who wishes she'd sit down, Sylvia starts pulling at the one question no one else will touch: how a man can be that marvelous and that dead. Havenmere reaches its verdict early and is almost never wrong. Sylvia would like a word before it sticks.
Welcome back to Havenmere. Barry has nothing to hide.
About the Havenmere Mysteries: The Havenmere Mysteries are Florida-set cozy mysteries following Sylvia Stern, an eighty-five-year-old widow with a sharp eye, a spiral notebook her late husband called her murder book, and a talent for noticing the things Havenmere Country Club would very much prefer she didn't. Each book stands alone, but readers who start with Book One, Murder on Clubhouse Lane, will find familiar faces, a few running jokes, and a fourteen-foot alligator named Barry who has been living rent-free in the water hazard on fourteen since before anyone can remember.
The series combines classic whodunit plotting with the particular absurdity of Florida country club life: the social hierarchies, the widow networks, the golf carts with custom upholstery, and the collective agreement never to look too closely at anything.
Praise for Murder on Clubhouse Lane
"Sharper than the local police department and twice as determined."
Death of a Marvelous Man is Book Two of the Havenmere Mysteries by W.A. Withrow.
