Chicken Scratch — Becki Willis

When Madison Reynolds finds herself widowed and penniless before forty, she does the only thing she knows to do â€" she packs up her teenage twins and moves back home with her eighty-year-old grandmother. Life in The Sisters, Texas has not changed much since she's been gone, but at least her best friend Genesis is there to soften the transition back into small-town life. To make ends meet, Madison opens In a Pinch Temporary Services. Her first real client is Ronny Gleason, but when she shows up for the first day of work at the Gleason Poultry Farm, Madison makes a gruesome discovery. The dead body she finds belongs to Mr. Gleason. When a local man is arrested for murder, his mother tries to hire Madison to exonerate him. Even though she explains she is no private investigator, Madison takes the job anyway. Both mothers are desperate, after all: Lucy Ngyen to clear her son's name, and Madison to pay her bills. But as she begins asking questions around town, someone makes it clear they want her to stop. With a daughter determined to go back to Dallas, a son settling into small town life, a feisty grandmother who knows all the town gossip, bill collectors calling, and now someone trying to keep her silent, Madison has no time for re-kindling her high school crush with police Chief Brash deCordova. She has her hands full just trying to stay alive. If she survives her amateur investigation, Maddy has a decision to make. Will she go back to her life in Dallas, or will she build a new life here in The Sisters?