Save the Date

A dying woman planned her own celebration of life down to the minute - the music, the seating, who speaks and for how long. Then she died a week early, and the party went on exactly as she wrote it, and a man she seated was dead in the orchard by half past three.

Alma Rasmussen got a diagnosis in spring and spent her last good month at a kitchen table writing a party: two hundred guests, the orchard in blossom, a run-of-show to the minute, and a note to the one woman on the peninsula she trusted to run it exactly as written - because I'll not be there to fix it. Tess Lindqvist has run weddings with bodies in them before. She has never run a party for a dead woman who planned it, and left a line on page four that only someone who reads things twice would catch.

On the afternoon of the celebration, in the blossom, forty feet from a beekeeper's hives, Alma's estranged brother-in-law walks the orchard to a bench and is stung, and reaches for the auto-injector he has carried for fifty years, and it is not in his pocket. The county is at the party - Alma seated the investigator at table twelve, the county, in case. And the run-of-show has items left to run: a reading at twenty to four, a photograph at five, lanterns at twenty to six, and at six o'clock, one last line, to be read aloud by Tess and no one else.

Because Alma Rasmussen did not only plan a party. She planned, from a kitchen table, dying, to say a thing the shore had buried for thirty-nine years - and she knew, writing it, that the only person who could change her pages might change them to something worse, and she wrote the last page for that too.

Save the Date is the sixth and final Sorrel Bay Mystery: a small-town cozy about a woman who waited thirty-nine years for a room, a deed held too long that a stranger finally reaches for, a warden who takes his hat off on a step at last, and a goose who gets off her sill. Recipes included. The barn's door closes here - but it closes open.