Bone Harvest: A Claire Watkins Mystery (Claire Watkins Mysteries)

Then the quiet was broken. The baby reached up a hand and jerked at the tablecloth. A spoon hit her on the head, and she started to cry. Bertha Schuler stuck her head out the door and called that dinner was ready. The clock in the hallway struck the half hour. And the first shot was fired.

The unsolved murders at a remote Wisconsin farmhouse half a century ago have receded into time. But one deranged man will do anything to make sure that all of Pepin County remembers that bloody day.

The world was out of balance. It had been so for nearly fifty years. Only he could see it. Only he could change it.

When a quantity of dangerous pesticides is stolen from the local co-op, Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins is called in to investigate. The thief has left one bizarre clue: the finger bone of a child long dead.

The pesticides soon reappear with devastating effect—in flowerbeds, in animal feed, and in a fatal concoction at a Fourth of July picnic. Each time, a tiny human bone is left at the scene. With the help of Harold Peabody, the quirky, aging editor of the Durand Daily, Claire unravels the secrets of the past, leading her to a pair of young lovers, a man enraged over his mother’s death, an obsessive recluse, and the deputy who first discovered the corpses of the Schuler family Claire desperately races against time to find the madman before he uses the lethal pesticide again. But he won’t be stopped. Not until he gets what he wants.

The truth must be told. Or more will die. The flowers and the birds were only the beginning. . . .

Written with Mary Logue’s trademark power and compassion, Bone Harvest is a bold, brilliant thriller that carries the reader deep into the heart of the Wisconsin bluffs country, into the hearts of its people—and to a startling conclusion.


From the Hardcover edition.