Poisoned Pairings

A student helping set up for a beer and food pairings event in Hera Knightsbridge's microbrewery dies there under suspicious circumstances. At first the death looks like a suicide, but the medical examiner determines it is murder, and Hera and her lover, Deputy Sheriff Jake Ryan again find themselves partners in searching for the killer. Not only does murder threaten the community, but something more explosive has come to the valley - hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a controversial gas drilling technique whose proponents say can take the poor families of the region out of debt. Hera and her fellow brewers are convinced it will contaminate the water supply, as it had in other places, and change forever the pristine beauty of the valley. Connections among the student, the family of a dead brewer, a religious leader and the gas companies lead Hera and Jake into a maze of confusing and conflicting clues. Before the two can unravel the case's tangled threads, Jake is called away to another job, leaving Hera alone to uncover the identity of the killer before she becomes the next victim.


Genre: Mystery