When Sister Audrey asks Jimi Plain to volunteer at her most recent Hunter Divorce Adjustment seminar, Jimi immediately agrees because five and a half years ago she had benefited after her own divorce. Jimi hopes to talk her best friend, Linda into attending; Linda and her five children are having a hard time coping after her husband left to be with his 22-year-old girlfriend. Linda really needs the support because their joint savings account is gone, including their retirement accounts and the kids' college savings; even the equity in their home is second mortgaged.

The fourth divorce meeting is held at the home of Bruce Mann, a fellow seminar member who heads the tax department at a prominent bank. When Jimi and the others arrive, they find Bruce half-dressed and very dead on the kitchen floor. First, Jimi calls the police, then she calls her cousin, Danny, who is a police detective.

Danny informs Jimi that Bruce's death is no accident because the house was rigged to electrocute him, and the murderer is most likely a member of the group. If that isn't surprising enough, he warns her to stay away from Linda because she is the prime suspect.

Jimi is a free-lance technical writer, not a detective, yet her strong belief in Linda's innocence gives her the impetus to investigate. Her role as a volunteer for the divorce seminar provides her with the excuse to be nosy and a pretext to quietly accumulate information.

Eight years after her divorce, Jimi's personal life is still monetarily impacted and her daughters feel the neglect of having an absent father. Jimi solves her own money problems by buying her grandmother's house for a bargain price and letting her grandmother continue to live on the ground floor. This causes immense upheaval for the girls, since her grandmother can't control her ill feelings about their father and insults him every chance she gets.

There are weaknesses in the book, the foremost is the large number of shocked, angry, upset, overwhelmed, and depressed characters. In addition, it is discouraging that all the men, except thrice-divorced Danny, are portrayed as jerks, and that Jimi, so many years after her own divorce, is not showing any interest in having a romantic relationship of her own.

Optimistically, in the next book of the series, Jimi will move forward and get on with her life by leaving the divorce theme behind. The book's greatest strength lies in having a large cast of maladjusted, erratic, and unbalanced characters, all of whom have motives to commit the crimes, and the abundant clues and clear-cut information, which provide the means to solve the mystery.

--Monica Pope