A Bat in the Belfry: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

A weather front producing heavy rain, gale-force winds, and flooding descends on Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree and other Eastport, Maine, residents in Graves’s patchwork 16th Home Repair Is Homicide mystery (after 2012’s Dead Level). Fourteen-year-old Karen Hansen plots her escape from Eastport and her drunken father; Chip Hahn, a visiting friend of Jake’s son, Sam, goes for an evening walk and ends up a murder suspect; a gang of young toughs torments “dweeb” David Thompson; and former Boston cop Lizzie Snow heads to Eastport in search of a child who might be the daughter of Lizzie’s dead sister, Sissy. Sam’s attempts to clear Chip lead him into danger, and the many story lines begin to merge as the storm intensifies. This isn’t one of Graves’s smoothest tales, but Lizzie Snow may be an important addition to her usual cast of characters. Agent: Jane Rotrosen, Jane Rotrosen Literary Agency. (Apr.)