Cj Verburg

Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma Cj Verburg

400 years after the Pilgrims first landed on Cape Cod, a business lunch for leaders of GreenHome LLC and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe leads to murder. Or does it? Stopping at a yard sale on their way to Leo's Back End, property developer Harriet Benbow beat out two fellow guests to buy a silver Art Deco toastrack. The next morning she's found dead. Payback? A burglary gone wrong? A violent protest against GreenHome's plan to build luxury condos on an indigenous burial ground?




Detective Pete Altman wonders: What kind of perp would cut up the victim's scalp? Back End soup-chef Lydia Vivaldi and Wampanoag pastry chef Mudge Miles wonder: Is somebody trying to frame the Indians? Reclusive artist-author Edgar Rowdey, who'd rather be plotting his own Agatha Christie mystery for Golden Age magazine, wonders: Where on earth does an antique toastrack fit in?




In this picturesque seaside village, solving a crime takes collaboration. Quansett is too diverse for everyone to like each other -- natives and wash-ashores, fishermen and artists, Irish, Brazilian, English, Cape Verdean, Wampanoag, African-Americans -- but it's so small that everyone has to get along. This brutal attack threatens to shatter their community. Lydia hopes it won't also sink her catering start-up with Mudge. With the grapevine buzzing, and the police slogging through mismatched clues, suspects, lies, and betrayals, she's afraid not even the Back End's amateur sleuths can untangle this one in time to stop the killer.