Emergency Stop by Beatrix Nyland

Margit Solheim spent twenty-two years driving a truck across America and never once looked back at the town she left at eighteen. Then her father died, and she inherited the only driving school in Sorrel Point, Minnesota, one dual-control Corolla named Gunnar, a three-legged dog, and a filing cabinet full of fifty-two years of his notes on how every person in town handles a car.

She means to sell up in the spring. She keeps not doing it.

When the county road boss is found dead in his truck at the bottom of the boat launch, the sheriff's office calls it a drunk driving into Lake Superior. Margit looks at the seat. It's been run all the way forward, for someone a foot shorter than the dead man. The mirrors are wrong. The truck is in neutral. And the radio is tuned to a station he'd have sooner drowned than listen to.

Everyone drives like who they are, her father used to say. Somebody in Sorrel Point drove that truck into the lake, and Margit has sat beside half the town while they learned to drive.

With a seventy-two-year-old student who logs every car that passes her window at night, a deputy who failed his own road test twice, and a dog who knows when to put his head on your shoulder, Margit starts reading the town the only way she knows how: by how it parks.

First in a new cozy mystery series set on Minnesota's North Shore. Egg coffee, hotdish, lutefisk, and a killer nobody saw coming.