Dittany Henbit, active member of the Lobelia Falls ladies Grub and Stake Gardening and Roving Club, is out one early morning with bow and arrow (roving, the season being too early for gardening), and discovers a young man with a bulldozer where no bulldozer should be. Poking her nose in where it shouldn’t be, she discovers the dead body of the local water commissioner. He’s been shot by an arrow – but the markings on the arrow are a mystery to Dittany and the rest of the Grub and Stakers: they don’t match the markings that anyone in the club or the corresponding gentleman’s club uses.

Dittany, accompanied by her employer – a regency romance writer who sports a purple cape, and strides about shouting things like Gadzooks! – and her neighbor’s large, intrusive dog, investigates, assisted by not one but two swains – the man from the bulldozer and her employer’s nephew, who writes Westerns.

Throughout the book we meet a host of quirky characters, marshals with broad Scottish accents, ladies who brew dandelion tea, dishonest real estate magnates. She foils a kidnapping and gets one of the members of her club elected mayor, and foils the dastardly plot to develop the town that was the reason for the whole murder in the first place.

This book is light, and lightly humorous, and fun to read. Interestingly, of all MacLeod’s detectives, Dittany, although she also gets married at the end of the first book, is the one female detective who continues to drive the detection forward after marriage. Others have babies and settle down; Dittany has babies and keeps detecting.

Well, I guess there isn’t much else to do in little Lobelia Falls.