In Bradley, everyone's one nosy neighbor away from the deep end.  

Spring has come to Bradley, North Carolina, and the whole town is turning out for the fiftieth running of the lake's beloved fishing derby. Participants include Myrtle Clover's put-upon son, the police chief, who's launched his boat from the dock that still, technically, belongs to his mother.

Myrtle would happily watch the whole circus from her porch. But every good thing in Bradley has a self-appointed king, and the man who lords over the derby committee, the chess club, and everyone else's business is found dead in his greenhouse the morning the boats go out —an unused EpiPen by his hand, and a hive humming next door. A terrible accident, the town agrees.

Myrtle is not convinced. The police don't seem convinced, either. They seem suspicious of her dearest friend Miles. Miles had the bad luck to lose a very public chess match, and his temper, with the dead man barely a week before. Clearing Miles means proving there was a crime at all, and behind the boxwood hedges of Magnolia Lane, Myrtle turns up a quiet affair, an old debt of guilt, and a marriage coming apart at the seams.

Then a second neighbor dies, and the town is only too glad to call that one an accident too. 

The town wants a tidy story and a quiet spring. Myrtle Clover wants the truth,  even if she has to sink the whole derby to land it.