Footprints in the Sand (Piper Donovan Series #3)

by Mary Jane Clark

Overview

It's the dead of winter and struggling actress and wedding-cake decorator Piper Donovan is thrilled to be in warm and romantic Sarasota, Florida, enjoying the powdery white beaches, soothing seas, and golden sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico. She and her family are there to celebrate her beloved cousin's wedding. Not only is Piper creating the sugar-sand-dollar-festooned wedding cake, she's also the maid of honor.

But a cloud seems to be hovering over the whole affair. Shortly after a bridesmaid mysteriously disappears, a kindly neighbor's car is run off the road and a prospective witness, an innocent Amish teenager, is threatened to keep silent. Then a body is found on the beach where the wedding will take place. With the nuptials in jeopardy, it falls to Piper to unmask a killer.

As Piper gets close to figuring out who's been covering his guilty footprints in the sand, the cunning killer has already set his sights on Piper as his next victim!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062135452
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/21/2014
Series:	Piper Donovan Series , #3
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	524,690
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mary Jane Clark worked at CBS News for nearly three decades. Her twelve KEY News media thrillers were inspired by that experience. Envisioning the Piper Donovan/Wedding Cake mystery series, Mary Jane enrolled in cake-decorating classes and researched unique wedding locations. The daughter of an FBI agent and a mother who customized cakes for the neighborhood kids when she was growing up, Mary Jane has two grown children and splits her time between New Jersey and Florida.

Editorial Reviews

In bestseller Clark’s fast-paced third Piper Donovan mystery (after 2012’s The Look of Love), the wedding cake decorator and sporadic actress pulls double-duty at the Sarasota, Fla., upcoming marriage of her cousin Kathy Leeds by serving as Kathy’s maid of honor as well as preparing the cake. Casting a pall on the proceedings is the discovery of the body of one of the bridesmaids on a patch of isolated beach. Piper once again turns amateur sleuth, despite the misgivings of her family and FBI counterterrorist agent boyfriend, Jack Lombardi. Potential suspects include an ex-con, a real estate developer, and a wedding planner with ties to the local Amish community. While Piper shows concern for those close to her, she can also display a callous side (e.g., she uploads photos of a crime scene to her Facebook page). Piper’s emotional distance may be off-putting to some cozy readers looking for more heart. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris Endeavor. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Beautiful Florida and a cousin's wedding can't keep cake-decorator Piper out of danger when a corpse is found on the beach—and that's just for openers. This is Piper's third outing (after The Look of Love). [See Prepub Alert, 8/20/12.]

Library Journal

Actress/baker Piper Donovan (The Look of Love, 2012, etc.) travels to Sarasota for another homicide-laced wedding at the best beach in America. Piper has been chosen as maid of honor by her cousin Kathy Leeds, who's marrying Dan Clemens of the Mote Marine Lab. But it's impossible for the bridal couple to hold center stage when they're competing with so many corpses. The first victim is Shelley Hart, Kathy's colleague at the Whispering Sands Inn, whose murderer buries her in the sand and tells Levi Fisher, an Amish teen who caught him in the act, that he'll kill Levi's sister Miriam if he doesn't keep mum. The second is Levi, who hangs himself and leaves behind a suicide note confessing to the murder rather than condemning Miriam to unending threats. He's followed the same night by Jo-Jo Williams, an observant cocktail waitress whose brief stint as a blackmailer comes to a predictably swift end. The police assume that Levi is the killer, both before and after his death. But Clark duly implicates Dan's best man, Brad O'Hara, a kayak concessionaire with a troubled past; Levi's uncle Isaac Goode, the Whispering Sands wedding planner who's been shunned by the Amish ever since renouncing his faith; and developer Walter Engel, whose bare-knuckled tactics for expanding the Whispering Sands strike some homeowners as uncomfortably menacing. The behavior of both the killer and the hapless Levi, who falsely confesses to the murder but leaves behind a cryptic clue to the real miscreant, defy belief, but fans of Clark's more famous ex-mother-in-law will be pleased to see that the line distinguishing the two has virtually disappeared.

Kirkus Reviews