It's Valentine's Day in Tinker's Cove. And while the cupcakes Lucy Stone is baking for her children will have pink frosting and candy hearts, Lucy's thoughts aren't centered on sugary sentiments. She's barely arrived at her first board meeting of the newly-renovated library when Bitsy Howell, the new librarian, is found in the basement with a bullet in her heart. Shot dead only minutes before story hour was to start.
The agitated board members assume that Bitsy was killed by an outsider, until Detective Lt. Horowitz arrives on the scene and shocks them all by announcing the killer is among them. As far as he's concerned, every member had ample opportunity to shoot Bitsy. Not only was each of them in the library at the time of the murder, but there were no footprints in the snow outside the basement door. And while he warns Lucy to keep her nose out of police affairs, she can't help but throw herself into the case.
Lucy was already aware that Bitsy's uppity big city ways rubbed some people in Tinker's Cove the wrong way. Then there was her tendency to gossip about the books her readers borrowed. But Lucy had a hunch that motives for the librarian's violent death ran a lot deeper. From her conversation with former librarian Miss Tilley, a gossip in her own right, she learns there were sharp divisions between Bitsy and some board members. But would any of them be irked enough to murder her?
From Hayden Norcross's elegant antique shop to Gerald Asquith's sedate study, to Corney Clark's chic kitchen, where the life-style consultant strives to rival Martha Stewart, Lucy relentlessly snoops into the curious lifestyles and shocking secrets of Tinker's Cove's most solid citizens... secrets that will plunge her into a terrifying confrontation with a conniving killer...