The Serpents Trail

Sue Henry

Homer, Alaska, has been Maxie McNabb's home all her adult life. Now her children are grown and she has buried two wonderful husbands. She is 63 and has discovered she likes traveling in a recrational vehicle with her dog Stretch. She and Stretch now summer in Alaska and winter down in the lower 48 states.

This year she is leaving Alaska a bit sooner than she had planned. Maxie's life long friend Sarah called and asked her to come. Sarah knows she is dying from heart failure and only has a few more weeks to live. But she has some secrets she has never told Maxie because (as we later learn) the time was never right. When Maxie arrives in Grand Junction, Colorado, she finds Sarah's home open and ransacked. Sarah isn't there. Someone is surprised and runs out of the front as she comes in from the back. Then the police arrive in response to an anonymous phone call.

Sarah is at the hospital. She had been found earlier in the day collapsed in her home and was rushed in. Maxie has a few moments with her before she falls back to sleep. Sarah's words are wandering and cryptic. Maxie tries to learn more, but she is chased out by the attendant nurse. The next morning Sarah is dead. Maxie is unexpectedly the executor of Sarah's will rather than Sarah's son. Why? That is only the first of the mysteries Maxie will discover. Before she's done, she may die herself...

The is Sue Henry's first full Maxie McNabb book. I understand Maxie first appears in one the the Jessie Arnold and Alex Jensen novels in Alaska. The Serpents Trail gives a good full introduction to Maxie and a mystery. Why would someone want to kill a woman who only has a few weeks to live? Yet that appears to be the case. This is a light mystery but full of twists and turns the reader doesn't see coming. There are vivid pictures of the area around Grand Junction, Colorado, and of the Colorado State Monument. There is a side trip to the geneology library in Salt Lake City run by the Latter Day Saints. I didn't know that type of resource was available to geneologists - nice.

The Serpents Trail
The Tooth of Time
The Refuge
The End of the Road

Deadfall by Sue Henry