An aloof farmer in Killdeer, NY is considered abnormal to most everyone in town--in part because he drives a tractor downtown, but mostly because he wears a skirt. As if that weren't enough to make the stuttering recluse the town oddball, he's running for mayor. But the real mystery starts when his crisped remains are found in his living room--in the big, old, stuffy chair that turned into his funeral pyre.

Author Shelly Reuben resists the norm in relating her mysteries. Instead of a lone central figure who tracks down the clues that lead to a dangerous killer or raft of mobsters, she employs an ensemble of players who take turns in the investigation. What's more, she makes a serialization move by carrying the group of clue-seekers over from her previous gem of a thriller, "Tabula Rasa."

This cozy posse of pursuers tracking down Morgan Mason's killer is a tight-knit family symbiotically applying what one of them calls a "reciprocal forensic relationship." It consists of State Trooper Sebastian Bly and Fire Marshall Billy Nightingale, who share the unpleasantries when it comes to demanding answers from suspects. In a somewhat less official capacity, but nonetheless probing, is Sebastian's wife and Billy's sister, Annie Bly. As a part time reporter for the County Courier and Gazette, she performs the service of narrating the 3-pronged hunt from the authorial perspective.

The Blys' beautiful and talented 18-year old daughter Meredith, having been adopted and raised by them and escaping death in the prior novel, is headed for a ballet career while attracting two town suitors. Moe and Sonny Dillenbeck--one white and one black 17-year olds and brothers by adoption--claim separately to Meredith's father Sebastian that he'll be his daughter's future husband. But they earn their keep in the investigation by apparently being the only townsfolk who ever penetrated the social defenses of the dead farmer. They thereby have a lot to offer by way of disclosing what motivated the strange and withdrawn loner.

The mystery leads to false conclusions by presumptuous parties with agendas, mainly TV huckster and mayoral competitor Snowdon Creedmore who claims the death was the result of "spontaneous human conbustion." Besides making a mockery of law enforcement and proper investigation, Billy, the only real fire expert around, pronounces Creedmore's notion "Gobbledygook."

Creedmore, an unsavory self-promoter inclined to hype the salacious and the notorious on his local TV show, also brags about having been the first person to discover the body of the man he has antagonized because the farmer wouldn't remove his satellite dish from his property--a source of petty, disproportionate consternation. Showing his home movie of the death scene on his TV show, which he made without approval from any party, official or otherwise, may be little more than an attempt to prove his shaky theory and glorify himself, but the effect of his bizarre bad taste is to create suspicions about his true role in the homicide.

Suspicion turns also to an even more disreputable character on the outskirts (no pun intended) of town, one Domingo Nogales Ramirez. He's the owner of Hobby Hills, a spread next to the Skirtman's, where Ramirez stages weekend parties for junkies, hopheads, dopers and phony security guards, scandalizing a citizenry that tends toward the politely predictable. The Dillenbeck boys relate how Mason once drove his tractor through Ramirez' front gate to complain. Did the hostile partygiver take revenge on an irksome neighbor?

In a subplot that's anything but minor, Annie takes on the editing of her paper when her boss quits and literally dumps full responsibility for it on her. She decides to write an article on the history of the town auditorium, bringing her to the house of local historian Lillian Roadigger and gardener husband Vernon, a precise little man in retirement from a career as VP of a company that made tongue depressors.

A Reuben novel would be incomplete without analysis of an ashy crime scene in which arson can usually be ruled in, and she provides much knowledgeable discourse on the clues to origin and cause that pertain to this one. (Relishing every moment in the telling, we suspect.) The licensed P.I. and certified fire investigator author carries on her well-established tradition with the torching of a man whose tragedy was to be misunderstood and mischaracterized by his community.

The yarn, however, never rises to the horrific threat level and drama of her prior work due, perhaps, to the masking and holding out of crucial clues while sidetracking us with an abundance of deviously plotted red herrings. She makes up for it with typically boundless literary energy and vivid feeling for her characters--a trademark of her writing and a great pleasure for her readers.

The tension of a threatening villain may not be much in attendance to stoke the fires of suspense, but this blend of style and authoritative know-how adds another fascinating dimension to Reuben's fiery case file.