Lucy Resnick’s nerves are as limited being a tea cozy. Her fresh goats, Hot Lips and Gidget, maintain making a break for the city square, her truck is usually dying, and her boyfriend’s beautiful ex-wife is in town for the holidays. Worse, someone’s digging openings on her land…and uprooting her peach orchard and dewberry patch in the process. Lucy needs additional holiday tension like she needs a blow to the head – which she receives one night, courtesy of the mystery digger.

When the dim-witted sheriff arrests among Lucy’s close friends, the former reporter puts her own problems about the back burner and begins investigating. What she finds is certainly a patchwork of clues – an hurt puppy, a sapphire necklace gone missing, and a string of poison-pen characters – that draws her deep right into a internet of small-town secrets.

Word moves fast in Buttercup. When the killer learns Lucy’s around the path, Lucy finds she needs a lot more than her confirming skills to save her friend – she needs a Christmas miracle.