Broken Star — Lizbie Brown

Ed McBain meets Jane Austen in this witty and sharp-edged introduction to the sleuthing duo of Elizabeth Blair and Max Shepard. Wry and down-to-earth Elizabeth is a widow who has forsaken her native Turkey Creek, Virginia, for a genteel English existence selling patchwork quilts in the picturesque town of Bath. What could be more quaint and placid?
But instead of charming vicars and elegant solicitors for neighbors, Elizabeth has Max - a handsome private-eye-cum-ladies-man who makes his living probing the dark secrets behind Bath's "quaint village" facade.
Broken Star: to Elizabeth, a quilt pattern; to Max, the unpopular television celebrity who needs the P.I. to clear him of a murder charge. When another death forges a connection between both stars, Max and Elizabeth join forces to sew up the case in this first in a literate and lethal series of quilt-pattern crime novels.