This first in a series introduces Emma Lord, the newspaper editor of The Advocate, a small-town paper.Together with her assistant, Vida Runkel, and local sheriff, Milo Dodge, Emma solves a mysterious death and deals with her son and sometimes long-distance boyfriend. ( )

A good start to a GREAT series. ( )

Emma Lord is a wonderfully independent woman, a journalist of the big city of Seattle, who has purchased the little town newspaper of Alpine, a fictional town, but one based on the destroyed town, where Mary Daheim’s family once lived. Emma has invested her life and welfare in it. As the outsider, she must adjust to the local controls, the old-timers already in place on her staff, and to the expectations of a town who sees her as NEW. Her Catholic faith, her love of the wrong, and very unavailable man, and her love for a son with growing pains, and her brother, the charitable priest, give her substance the reader can sympathize with.
Her very first outing pits her against the wealthiest and most powerful man in the town and his arrogant family. She manages to prevail, at least in the matter of finding the bad guy in the first not one, but two murders in the town since the roaring boom days. ( )