Despite her previous successful experiences with crime-solving, Benni would really like to heed Gabe's wishes and stay out of the investigation this time - it has the makings of a pretty messy family affair, and anyway, Benni's far too busy handling her job at the folk art museum and worrying about whether the lovely Lydia might be reclaiming Gabe's affections - but the boot-junkie Detective Hudson who's assigned to the case simply won't leave her in peace. Benni reluctantly finds herself in the awkward position of digging up dirt on Sam's potential in-laws as she delves into twisted relationships and long-buried family secrets to unearth a chilling motive for murder.

In this latest entry in her Benni Harper "quilting" series, Earlene Fowler pieces together a highly readable story. But it is also a frustrating one in some respects. A newcomer to the series may encounter difficulty in keeping Benni's family relationships straight, as the author often refers only to a name and doesn't bother to identify the character's relationship to Benni, apparently assuming the reader already knows it from previous volumes. Although a list of characters is provided in the frontmatter, it contains only the members of the several generations of the Brown family - which includes the seven sisters of the title. Annoyingly, the characters' ages given in the list don't match up at all with ages and dates provided in the story itself, nor are the dates in the story internally consistent. For example, one character who is described as thirty-eight years old in 1925 is ninety-seven at the time of the story - which would mean it's only 1984 in the present -and another character who was seven in 1926 is seventy-five in the story - which would make it 1994 now. This may seem picky, but in a novel where the heroine is examining events and relationships of the long-ago past for clues, more care should have been taken, especially since some of the ages and dates do have plot significance.

Most disappointing is that both the murderer and the motive - though not the particulars, which do come as something of a surprise - are obvious almost from the outset. While the details of Benni's interplay with the investigator who's pushing for her help, her worries about a possible rekindling of old embers between Lydia and Gabe, and her heart-to-hearts with her cousin and her grandmother are interesting enough in themselves - and do fit into the flow of the story - at the end of the day one is left with the feeling that perhaps this story contains a little more chaff than wheat.

--Eleanor Mikucki