Murder at the Harvest Supper by Jeanette J. Lyons

One poisoned cup. One small Vermont town. Forty years of secrets. October 1967. Senior insurance claims examiner Harriet Talcott returns to the Vermont town she left behind, intending to settle questions about her mother’s struggling farm and get back to Boston as quickly as possible. Instead, fresh survey stakes in the family field lead her to Calvin Chaffee, Dunnett’s most powerful landowner—and to damaged records from the catastrophic flood of 1927 that still shadow Harriet’s father’s name. Then Calvin collapses at the annual harvest supper after drinking a cup of coffee prepared especially for him. When his death becomes a murder investigation, suspicion spreads through a community where land, debt, family loyalty, and old grudges have been accumulating for decades. Harriet’s professional instinct for damaged documents, careful timelines, and inconvenient inconsistencies draws her deeper into the case—and dangerously close to secrets some of Dunnett’s most respected citizens have spent forty years protecting. To clear the innocent, Harriet must reconstruct what happened inside a crowded church hall and discover why a present-day killing is tied to a disaster the town thought it had survived long ago. Murder at the Harvest Supper is an atmospheric historical mystery blending a fair-play whodunit, a sharp female sleuth, small-town New England intrigue, restrained suspense, and a layered story about memory, reputation, family, and the price of telling the whole truth.