The Alpine Zen (Emma Lord)

As an early summer heat wave beats down on Alpine, Emma and her staff are treading very lightly. For unfathomable reasons, the paper's House & Home editor, Vida Runkel, is in a major snit, refusing to speak to her colleagues. So when a peculiar young woman walks in claiming her parents have been murdered, and that she's in mortal danger, too, it fits right in with the rest of the craziness. Then, to the utter bafflement of her colleagues, Vida vanishes without a word to anyone. And just when Emma and her husband, Sheriff Milo Dodge, start to unsnarl these tangles, a male body, dead too long to identify, surfaces at the town dump - making what seemed merely weird feel downright sinister.

Mary Daheim is a Seattle native with a degree in communication from the University of Washington. Realizing at an early age that getting published in books with real covers might elude her for years, she worked on daily newspapers and in public relations to help avoid her creditors. She lives in her hometown in a century-old house. Daheim is also the author of the Alpine mystery series and the mother of three daughters.