Judith Guest

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location that had worked so well for her in that first novel.

Now she has written a murder mystery, The Tarnished Eye. As with most mysteries, its appeal hinges on the authenticity of the protagonist — in this case Hugh DeWitt, sheriff of the little town of Blessed, Michigan, somewhere north of Petoskey on the shores of Lake Michigan. Hugh has his own problems, mostly an unrelenting grief over the death of his infant son three years before the novel begins. But this sheriff knows his town and his county. He understands the tension between the locals who have managed to make a living up there for generations and the nouveau riche who build their gigantic homes with spectacular views of the Big Lake and then come up for weekends in the summer.

The mystery, apparently based on an unsolved crime from the 1960s, centers on the murder of all the members of one of those summer families. The Norbois family is from Ann Arbor, where the father owns a very profitable printing and publishing venture. As the book unfolds, the massacre looks as if it might be a crime of passion, then one done for financial gain, then a random sex crime — and it is finally revealed to be something else entirely. Guest moves easily through these plot twists, always giving just enough to keep the reader guessing, yet making her revelations seem entirely plausible. Her prose is crystal clear and never distracts from the story being told.