Meredith Morehouse, curator of the eclectic Imogene Museum, is suddenly short-staffed. Her favorite (and only) graduate student intern, Greg, is missing—without leaving behind so much as an empty pizza box, to say nothing of a note.

Plus, a prowler has been rearranging the museum’s brand new chamber pot exhibit. When Meredith's nighttime vigil to flush out the intruder results in witnessing a murder, she calls in Sheriff Marge Stettler. Soon nearly all the other inhabitants of the small town of Platts Landing, Washington, (including hunky tugboat captain Pete Sills) are in on the hunt—for the killers and a body that’s drifting down the Columbia River. Is the dead man her intern or somebody else? And if it's somebody else, where on earth is Greg?

Jerusha Jones lives in a small town in the west end of the Columbia River Gorge. When she grows up, she fully intends to be a feisty old lady. In the meantime, she regularly maxes out her library's lending limit, has happily declared a truce with the clover in the lawn, but is fanatical about sealing up cracks in her old house, armed with a caulking gun. Due to the number of gaps she has yet to locate, however, she has also perfected her big spider shriek. Jerusha loves wool socks, Pink Lady apples with crunchy peanut butter, feather pillows, scenery of breathtaking grandeur, and weather just cool enough to require a sweater, all of which are plentiful in the Pacific Northwest. She is eternally grateful to have escaped the corporate world with its relentless, mind-numbing meetings and now writes (or doodles or fantasizes or cogitates or stares out the window or whatever you want to call it) full time.