Long arm quilter Harriet Truman and her friends from the Loose Threads, decide an applique conference in Galveston, Texas, is just the change of pace they need after a difficult year in Foggy Point, Washington. The fact that local chef James Garvin will be in Galveston attending a Cajun cooking class is a bonus.
However, Harriet encounters a drunken groom in the lobby bar the first night and is then accosted by his angry bride, Jennifer Johnson. The next day, at a mixer designed to help the attendees get to know each other, the irate bride assaults her, cracking her eye socket. She chalks up her attacker's bad behavior to pre-wedding jitters and decides to stay at the conference.
The conference hosts an evening "pajama party" and Harriet joins in, ice bag in hand. A very apologetic sister of the bride, Sydney, comes to the party to apologize and the quilters invite her to stay, sympathetic to her role as sister to bridezilla.
Determined to enjoy her conference experience, Harriet again attends the evening stitching party. Bridezilla's sister Sydney also attends, and things are finally going well until the group learns Jennifer has been murdered.
Recognizing that Harriet is likely to be suspect number one, her friends concoct a crazy scheme to protect her from arrest. Her friend, fellow quilter, and lawyer Robin McLeod comes to Galveston and brings her friend, Houston lawyer Kirsten Meyer, to run interference with local law enforcement. As it turns out, there is no shortage of suspects who might have wanted the bride dead--including her groom, who was about to be the victim of an arranged marriage, and his pregnant girlfriend Kari. Jennifer also had an aggressive ex-boyfriend.
When the mother of the bride is attacked and left in a coma, the suspect pool grows larger. The bride's cash-poor relatives would benefit greatly if mother and daughters were to pass away, putting them in line to inherit.
Things suddenly get personal, though, when Lauren disappears in the middle of a ghost tour, and the Loose Threads settle in to unravel yet another complex puzzle before their quilting group becomes one member smaller.
Author Biography:
After working nearly 30 years in the high-tech industry, where Arlene's writing consisted of performance reviews, process specs and a scintillating proprietary tome on electronics assembly, she wrote her first mystery novel, Chip and Die. Quilt As Desired, the first mystery featuring long-arm quilter Harriet Truman and the Loose Threads quilting group was published in the fall of 2003 and was followed by eight more adventures; Double Wedding Death is the tenth in the highly-successful series. When not writing, Arlene is on the board of directors of the Harriet Vane Chapter of Sisters in Crime as well as the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center in Tillamook. She teaches knitting at Latimer and, of course, is a quilter. She's been married to Jack for more than thirty years, and they split their time between Tillamook and Multnomah Village in Portland. Arlene and Jack have three lovely children and three brilliant grandchildren. She also has two wonderful friends named Susan. She is aided in her writing endeavors by her canine companion Navarre.
