She fell in love in her fifties, but busy New Jersey community college professor Bel Barrett can barely find time to plan her upcoming wedding to her sweetie Sol -- or to read urgently needed e-mail messages on bladder control at mid-life. She must have been crazy to volunteer to teach a writing class to senior citizens. And fitting extracurricular sleuthing into her overbooked schedule should be damn near impossible.

But when one of her older students, racing pigeon enthusiast Dom Tomaselli, fails to show up after a death in the family -- his own -- Bel can't control her urge to investigate ... especially since Dom's distressed daughter insists the old man's demise was not accidental. When Bel ruffles feathers in the arcane world of racing pigeons, where the sins of the Tomaselli family come home to roost, she becomes a clay pigeon herself. One false move and Bel won't have to worry anymore about wedding plans -- someone else will be planning her funeral.