Rose Malone’s future is looking pretty bright except for three things: Her daughter is struggling with PTSD after being kidnapped, her lover is hitting the Appalachian Trail and taking his dog with him, and the rumor that there might be a million bucks in the building she just inherited has spread, and now every money-hungry ex-spy in her weird little town is bringing her cheap flowers and offering to search the place for her. Max Reddy needs to get back to the Appalachian Trail with his dog, Maggs, leaving his memories of the work he did for decades and the town of Rocky Start behind; it’s hard to recover from a life of undercover work when you’re in a community of ex-agents. But that community also has a woman and her daughter who he cares about more than he thought possible. Still, he made it his last mission to finish walking the entire trail, and he’s not the kind of guy who doesn’t finish what he starts. Rose understands why Max needs to go, but then there’s a death in town, and suddenly Rose and Max are once again dealing with a town full of retired spies and assassins, one of whom may have decided to go back to work. The targets seem to be the retired agents who may know things somebody wants buried, literally: the voluptuous bakery owner, the even more voluptuous femme fatale, the bitchy beekeeper, the hinky pharmacist, the obnoxious exterminator, the dignified funeral home operators, the divorcing postal workers, the sweet little old assassin with the support llama, and most annoying of all, Max. Very Nice Funerals: Somebody is taking “cleaning up the town” to a much lower level.
