Somebody Doesn't Like Sarah Leigh — Peg Herring

When a long-time friendship dies, does murder follow? Decades past junior high in a small, northern Michigan town, Caroline Batzer is snubbed by her best friend. At first confused, she's later stunned to learn Sarah Leigh betrayed her in a way she'd never have suspected. In an all-too-public setting, Caroline airs her anger at the woman everyone else in town considers saintly. When Sarah disappears soon afterward, it looks like Caroline murdered her. Desperately she tries to figure out who else could have done it -- Sarah's philandering husband? Her useless son? Why did Sarah go to the lake near the sinkholes? How did she vanish in the cold northwoods? Caroline's nightmare is just beginning, because those responsible for what happened to Sarah come after her, and they won't stop at just one murder. SOMEBODY DOESN'T LIKE SARAH LEIGH is a cozy Michigan mystery about the disintegration of a friendship between two women with an intriguing murder mystery that involves the historic Bay View community near Petoskey. Excerpt Darkness masked the face of the terrified woman beside me, but her labored breathing matched my own. Stumbling blindly through the dark woods, we ran into tree trunks and tripped over mounds, each of us occasionally gasping from pain at the lash of a branch across the face or stubbing a toe on an unseen rock or root. I sensed her waning spirit and flagging energy. I was not much better off. And why should I care if she fell behind? We had to stop running soon. For one thing, we had pushed ourselves farther than I would have thought possible for two women in the fifth decade of life. In addition, our hippo-like crashing through the woods made so much noise that our flight had to be easy for pursuers to track. And worst of all, we had no idea where we were going. We could end up circling back to the very people we now sought desperately to avoid. Suddenly my path was blocked, and I stopped, breath rasping in my chest. A tree lay before me, broken off halfway up, probably by lightning. Its jagged trunk pointed into the sky, but its branches swept the ground, held in place by a splinter of raw white wood that caught what little moonlight there was. My companion blundered into my back, unaware that I had stopped. Her push sent me forward a step, and I stumbled into the still-springy jumble of branches. As I caught my balance, my foot felt the edge of a depression. I thumbed the flashlight on for the briefest moment, beam angled downward. The ruined treetop hung over a gully, and the thick layers of dying branches hid an empty space beneath. My belabored brain grasped at an idea. The safety we might find there was better than nothing. How had this happened to me, middle-aged Caroline Batzer, the Bilbo Baggins of Aldridge, Michigan? The fact that I was hiding from murderers, desperate men who intended that I breathe my last before this night was over, was because of a woman who had once been such a close friend that I could never have imagined she would turn on me. Because of her, I had suffered confusion and stress, told the biggest lie of my life, was suspect in a mysterious disappearance, and was now a candidate for murder victim. I had a long time to think about the situation as we sat petrified, our legs cramping in that dank almost-grave. What had I done to deserve this? Until two years ago, I had been Sarah Elizabeth Leigh's best friend.