Making Friends Can Be Murder - Softcover

West, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593335538 ISBN 13: 9780593335536

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Thirty-year-old Sarah Jones gets caught up solving a murder after unknowingly befriending a dangerous con artist (who’s nothing like what she seems) in this playful, twisty mystery from acclaimed author Kathleen West.

It feels like kismet when Sarah Jones, newly relocated to Minneapolis after abruptly calling off her engagement, gets invited to join a group of women who share her same (very common) name. For years Sarah has received all types of correspondence intended for different Sarah Joneses, but now it seems that this mistake has given her the opportunity for an instant community.

What starts as a low-stakes meet-up called “The Sarah Jones Project” soon turns sinister when another local Sarah Jones is found dead, under suspicious circumstances, at the base of the downtown Minneapolis bridge. After fielding numerous calls from concerned loved ones ruling out their Sarah as the victim, the surviving Sarahs decide to take matters into their own hands.

Aided by the dead woman’s nanny, a newly commissioned (and very handsome and eligible) FBI agent, and a cloistered nun with a complicated past, the motley crew of unlikely friends are determined to get to the bottom of the murder of one of their own.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathleen West

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Chapter One

April 1, 2023

By the time the group met up for the long-anticipated yarn-bombing, Sarah had netted four new personal training clients via The Sarah Jones Project Instagram account. Not bad for the brainchild of a kid she'd met in her first week after moving to Minnesota.

"It's gonna be fun," Sarah had told her grandmother on the phone that morning, "and only a normal amount of weird."

"Your profile on the 'gram was nice," Grandma Ellie had said. Of course, Ellie approved of Sarah's unconventional stab at making friends in a new city. Ellie had always believed in "the fates."

The fates struck quite a lot when your name was as common as Sarah Jones-emails meant for other women who shared both monikers, multiple rewards customers at the local bookstore, alumni news that had nothing to do with you from your midsize university. Mistakes and misidentification abounded.

So it had been both surprising and not when three days after Sarah had arrived from Vermont and started as the director of personal training and running at LifeSport Fitness, she'd gotten LinkedIn and Instagram DMs from a girl with her same name. But, on purpose this time.

"It's the fates!" Ellie had said, and Sarah could only agree. She'd felt giddy when she'd driven to a meet-up of fellow local Sarah Joneses that week. The group had met twice already when she joined, and they'd been so welcoming. Brian, Sarah's ex-fiancé, had warned her it would take months to find community halfway across the country from home. But there she was, about to meet four women-well, three women and one seventeen-year-old kid-all with the same name. And in the month she'd spent with them since, The Sarah Jones Project had built a social media following. Sarah's client list was growing. There would certainly be more after they "bombed" the iconic eastern cottonwood in Crosby Farm Regional Park. The Pioneer Press had sent a reporter, a woman young enough to be on her first assignment, after the group had sent in a tip. Lucky for all of them, it seemed like a slow news week. A group of same-namers could make the local section.

"Remember," Sarah Patrice Jones, age sixty-nine, shouted to the group from her crouch near the tree's trunk, "stretch the fabric and simple stitch!"

Sarah-"Thirty," the group called her, as they all went by their ages so as not to be utterly confused-smoothed a double-stitched section of crocheted yarn in robin's-egg blue over a low branch and smiled at Seventeen. "This is the best," she whispered.

Seventeen beamed. "I know. I can't believe this is my 'punishment.'"

Sarah giggled. The group had begun because Seventeen had made several public and unfortunate social media blunders. The Catholic nun who directed the Upper School at Seventeen's Sacred Heart Academy had mandated a positive social media endeavor as part of a rehabilitative disciplinary proceeding.

"Is this right?" Forty-Four asked, pulling another swatch across the trunk.

Sarah held her hand over the part of the seam she'd been sewing and peered at Forty-Four's work.

"Obviously not!" Sixty-Nine piped in. "I measured precisely. We all did, remember? Or were you taking a selfie at that particular critical time?"

Thirty and Forty-Four exchanged a glance, and Thirty-Nine spoke up, her words muffled around the thick yarn needle she'd stashed in the corner of her mouth. "We have a social media presence to maintain," she said. "Forty-Four and I are the only same-named teachers who regularly wear matching outfits in the nine-state area!"

"So I've heard," Sixty-Nine said, repositioning the yarn square.

Sarah grinned as she stitched. "It's an odd group," she'd told Grandma Ellie about the Sarahs, "but they're also funny. And they're nice! You'd have to be, right? To even entertain something like this?"

Sixty-Nine, in addition to being the crochet master, had retired in the last year from corporate law and also ran a moderately popular Murder, She Wrote recap blog. Thirty-Nine and Forty-Four taught elementary school in neighboring rooms. And Twenty-Seven, Sarah's closest friend in town, was halfway to a PhD at the University of Minnesota in sociology. "Here for academic interests," she said when she'd shown up to The Sarah Jones Project a week after Sarah.

"It seems like destiny, right?" Twenty-Seven had said. "A whole club of me? A group devoted to having the most common name in the world?"

Seventeen had peered at the newcomer's state-issued ID at her first meeting. They couldn't have imposters, the kid insisted. That would "dilute the appeal of the project."

"It's not even the most common name in the state." Seventeen handed the license back to Twenty-Seven with an eyebrow arch. "James Johnson, for instance. James Smith. Both occur more per capita."

"But, you know what I mean, right?" Twenty-Seven had smiled at the other women. She was gorgeous, long brown hair settling perfectly over her shoulders. "When people tell you you're the seventh Sarah Jones they've met or something?"

Seventeen had looked suspicious, but then she came out with the group's own origin story. "There was another one on my basketball team," she admitted, "but she's horrible and she spells it wrong."

"No h?" Twenty-Seven had asked. But Seventeen's dopple-namer was even worse.

"Uh-uh," she had said. "Serafina."

"Good lord." Twenty-Seven had chuckled a little, and Thirty noticed her sparkling white teeth and the sideways S on her necklace. "So she's S-E-R-A? She's not invited, is she?"

"Absolutely not." Seventeen had put down her Starbucks and crossed her arms. "I'm a purist." She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, thinking the statement through. "But in a good way."

And now, here they were, performing their culminating task. They hadn't talked about what was next for the group, but they'd all agreed on a spring break after the yarn-bombing, during which Seventeen would rehab her AP Bio grade and the others would do whatever things normal adults did. The Sarahs swirled around the cottonwood, each with her own tote bag. The reporter from the Pioneer Press stood close, scribbling notes between questions like, "How many Sarah Joneses have you all met in your lifetimes?" and "Why yarn-bombing?"

"It's whimsical!" Seventeen said in response. "An intergenerational endeavor with positive public appeal." She'd rehearsed that one.

"Are we still on for lunch after this?" Twenty-Seven whispered to Sarah as they smoothed out a cable-stitch section.

"Totes," Sarah said. They'd go to their usual spot, a café across from her Minneapolis apartment, just a building north of the one her mother had lived in when she'd moved to the city thirty-five years before. Sarah liked to look up at the third-story window she imagined had been her mother's, liked thinking about Ainsley taking Sarah's father back there after they'd been to a play at one of the city's many tiny theaters. The fates had taken Sarah's mother from them back when Sarah was a sixth grader, but Ainsley had shared countless stories about her time in Minneapolis. Even though Brian had been sure the entire endeavor would be filled with woe, Sarah hadn't regretted moving to Minneapolis even one time, especially once she and Twenty-Seven became virtually inseparable in their first month of friendship. "Meant to be," Ellie had said. "Your mother would be proud."

And as she looked at the tree, its girth covered with fiber, Sarah agreed. Ainsley would have loved this as much as she'd loved making god's eyes with her daughter's Girl Scout troop, as much as she'd loved collecting lines of poetry in spiral-bound notebooks.

"It's frickin' gorgeous!" Seventeen said from the base of the ladder Sixty-Nine had climbed to stitch the final sections. "The colors! They're magical!"

"Let's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593335538
• ISBN 13: 9780593335536
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 433
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland