The Entry Form: A Small-Town Library Cozy Mystery, Book 2

The morning after judging at the Dunmore County Fair, the county's longtime preserves champion is found dead under the grandstand. The county calls it a fall and turns back to the midway. The Friends of the Fairweather Public Library would like to agree - except for the one detail nobody official will sit still for: the jars that took Best of Show under Ruby Helm's name were never Ruby Helm's jars.Fair week has emptied Fairweather onto the fairgrounds, Friends and all: a schoolteacher who has never yet lost a room, an archivist who has been filing the county's memory since before the county thought to ask, a treasurer who can hear a wrong number across a fairground, and the pourer at the food building's borrowed counter, to whom the fair says things it would never put on a form. They came to run the book barn and keep the urns going. They stay because of a name.What the Friends know how to do is read a town's own paper, and this year the paper is the fair's: entry forms filled out in a Thursday crush, a premium book that prices every ribbon, claim checks, judging sheets - and one commercial contract, announced for the whole fair to read, made out to the exhibitor of record, whoever the record says that is. Somewhere between the entries tent and the judges' table, a blue ribbon quietly turned into money, and the money is riding on the wrong name.It is August. The funnel-cake line is long, the coffee is strong, and the whole county is under one stretch of canvas being kind to itself - which is what makes the question so hard to ask out loud. Because Ruby Helm knew whose preserves had really won. And the first person she told was not the fair office.The county has a fair to finish. The Friends have a name to get right.THE ENTRY FORM is the second Fairweather Friends mystery - a small-town library cozy spending its week at the county fair. Everything the fair opens, the fair closes: one case, whole, no cliffhanger. New readers can start here.