Fear at First Glance

In this, the 6th Jim Stanton mystery, Janice Coldwell Stanton decides to attend her high school class reunion with takes the Stantons back to Jan’s tiny hometown of Stoney, Michigan.
Jan has become a poised, beautiful, and successful business woman, but to her classmates and the rest of the residents in her hometown, she would be remembered as a tall, skinny, frumpy, piano-playing accompanist.
Stoney High School will cease to exist after this school year, and with its closure so will end the town’s annual Homecoming Alumni Reunion tradition. While she has never attended a class reunion in the past, Jan sees this as the final opportunity to show off her husband and the woman she’s become.
Jim has never been to a class reunion, either, but agrees to accompany his wife as long as he can use the trip to Northern Michigan to introduce his bird dog, Judy, to woodcock, a game bird that will be all new to her nose.
That decision lands the Stantons squarely in the middle of a secret that has gone undiscovered for more than forty years.
Class reunions bring high school year books out of boxes all across America every year as alumni look for familiar faces and names that they’ll rediscover.
Jan’s yearbooks were lost in a house fire when she first met Jim; lacking that book sends her to the local historical museum. What she finds there starts her wondering about the fate of classmates who have lost all connection to the town and the school.
That wondering becomes more intense when Jim witnesses an exchange between two men who should have been strangers, and that fuels the pair of retired journalists to look even deeper into Stoney’s past.
As their investigation gains traction, they inevitably come face to face with “Fear at First Glance.”