MOTHER’S DAY MURDER

A political rivalry ends in murder as the fate of the after-prom party hangs in the balance.

Rock-ribbed Republican Barbara Hume copped the Gun Woman of the Year award by imagining left-leaning Democrat Tina Nowak’s face on every target. As long as Ashley Hume and Heather Nowak are in a dead heat for class valedictorian, Bar and Tina are equally invested in the local high school. When they end up co-chairs of the after-prom committee, it takes a steady Eddy like Lucy Stone (St. Patrick’s Day Murder, 2008, etc.) to make sure that two hellcats of Tinker’s Cove don’t make mincemeat of each other. Unfortunately, Lucy gets distracted by family worries. Sara, a high-school freshman, gets asked to the prom by baseball star Chad Mackenzie, a player in every sense of the word. And daughter-in-law Molly is suffering through postpartum depression as Lucy’s first grandchild Patrick proves to be a fussy sleeper with a voracious appetite. So Lucy passes by the Salt Aire tennis courts just too late to see someone who looks quite a bit like Bar shoot Tina through the heart. The case looks like an ace for the prosecutor. But convinced that Bar is innocent, Lucy uses all her clout as part-time reporter for the Pennysaver to find a killer with a real down-home motive.

Subplots jostle like lobsters in a trap in Meier’s 16th tale of murder in Maine.