A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown agrees to housesit, only to be faced with murder. Think you're stressed? Cassie Edwards' job working with computer servers has her fighting ulcers even before she arrives at little Peyton, N.C., to discover her uncle, a renowned botanist, sitting in a chair on a stream bank trying to share his cannabis with a dead man. Sure that gentle Uncle Frank would never murder anyone, she tries to clean up the crime scene before the police arrive and arrest the elderly stoner, who's now back at the house baking the special brownies she can only hope do not contain a secret ingredient. The sheriff, Jim Fletcher, is the brother of Cassie's best friend and her former high school crush. Although he still finds her attractive, both she and her uncle are on his list of suspects for killing the murdered man, a bodyguard for another high school classmate. Things get even worse when Cassie discovers a hidden room in her uncle's greenhouse packed with marijuana plants--far too many simply to help with his glaucoma. Fed up with his inability to give up pot, Frank's wife, Sylvia, has left him. So Cassie's the only one to protect Frank. When she burns her find in the backyard, she turns on the whole town and brings Jim to her door. Then, Frank is arrested by one of Jim's ambitious deputies, and Cassie, determined to solve this case on her own, dredges up secrets that could put her next on the killer's list. Corwin, the veteran of many romance novels and historical romantic mysteries (A Rose Before Dying, 2011, etc.), adds a modern mystery, amusing but easy to solve.
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