Matched to the Bone

Some matches are made in heaven. This one was buried under the dance floor.

Matchmaker Macie Fisher-Thompson finally has her groove back. Fisher Perfect Pairs is booming, her big Supervised Social is the talk of Clover Creek, Kentucky, and nobody in town has been murdered in months. Then a soft floorboard at the county’s prettiest event barn gets pried up an hour before the party… and out comes a forty-year-old skeleton wearing a very memorable belt buckle.

The bones are barely bagged before a true-crime genealogy star rolls into town with a camera, a catchphrase, and a lot of questions about 1982, the year Mamaw June made her very first match. And when the reporter is found dead in her tidy room at the Landmark B&B, her research mysteriously missing, suspicion lands on the last person who spoke to her: Macie’s own grandmother.

Now Macie has to turn her people-reading gifts loose on a double mystery forty-two years in the making: a love triangle the whole town misremembers, a sweetheart who “ran off to Texas” but never ran anywhere, three good women carrying guilt that was never theirs, and a killer counting on Clover Creek to keep looking the other way.

At least she’s not working alone. She’s got a sharp-tongued Mamaw with one secret left in the filing cabinet, a retired state trooper who keeps finding reasons to be “in the neighborhood,” a diner owner who polices gossip with a coffeepot, a taxidermied rooster named Gerald, and one maddeningly unreadable sheriff whose protective streak is finally, deliciously, starting to show.

Matched to the Bone is Book 4 in the Heartstrings and Homicides series: a small-town cozy mystery with a meddling grandmother, a slow-burn sheriff romance, fair-play clues, zero gore, and a town you’ll want to move to (murders notwithstanding). Each book solves its own case and can be enjoyed on its own, but the heartstrings are best read in order.

Grab your sweet tea. The matchmaking is supervised. The murder never is.