Speak Now

Thirty guests. One orchard. A bride who asked for the "speak now" line so she could hear the silence after it. And an ex-husband at the bottom of the lane in a grey Tahoe who had promised to object.

September on the Sorrel Bay peninsula: the cherries are picked, the tourists are gone, and Tess Lindqvist has a small second wedding to run at the Halvorsen Barn, a thing she can do in her sleep. Cory Ahlgren is marrying a gentle band teacher from Sturgeon Falls in front of both families, and the rehearsal goes exactly as rehearsals go, right up to the four seconds of silence, when a man laughs at the back of the chairs and says, pleasantly, that he objects. Not to her. To the groom. "Ask the Amundsens what happened on the cellar stairs."

By six the next morning he's at the foot of Tess's loft stair with his neck broken and an empty ring box open in his hand, and the door at the bottom of the stair is latched from the wrong side, with a hook that Tess put on herself and knows takes two hands.

The wedding goes on at two. Tess has her records: a light she took for the wrong person, a goose that has learned a second door, thirty-one place cards for thirty guests, a piano with a key missing, and a whiteboard with a dead woman's name in the corner. She has a groom who's lying to put himself where his daughter was. And she has, for the first time since June, a warden with nothing to stand on and a table booked at Sorensen's for seven.

Speak Now is the third Sorrel Bay Mystery: a small-town cozy about second chances and the things families put "twenty years" on and pass the gravy, with a first date interrupted by a phone call, a confession made to a wall instead of a recorder, and a Lutheran pastor who declines a courtesy from a goose. Recipes included.