Blood Relations

From Publishers Weekly:Old secrets are brought to light when a drought hits the small town of New Kassel, Mo., the setting for MacPherson's sixth delightful Torie O'Shea mystery (after 2002's Killing Cousins). As the river goes down, the bones of the wreck of the steamboat Phantom are revealed, and soon the old stories of a cache of diamonds that went down with the ship in 1919 are drawing visitors to town. Among the curious are a slick television reporter and his cameraman and a team from a nearby junior college, who claim to be working on a documentary about the wreck. As an authority on local history and genealogy, Torie is naturally interested in the mystery, and when a murderer strikes, Torie and her friend, another reporter, are the first to find the body. While Torie digs for the truth, she's also dealing with the discovery that she has a half-sister, a fact that her charming and feckless father has neglected to tell her. Weaving the story and the characters into the believable minutiae of small-town life, MacPherson provides a stellar example of the traditional cozy.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.