Big Lake Snowdaze (Big Lake, #13)

Big Lake's first annual Snowdaze celebration to kick off the winter season was off to a good start. Mother Nature cooperated with the event planners with a cold front that brought a heavy snowfall to the White Mountains of Arizona, dumping over a foot of the white stuff at the higher elevations just two days before Snowdaze weekend began in early December. The little mountain town looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with Christmas decorations strung from the light poles on Main Street, kids building snowmen in their yards, and smoke rising from chimneys all over Big Lake.

Yes, it looked like Snowdaze was going to come off without a hitch. Everybody was saying so. Well, almost everybody. Maybe Sheriff Weber was a natural born grinch, as his fiancée, Deputy Robyn Fuchette, sometimes implied. Or maybe his years wearing a badge had made him cynical.

Either way, when they found the nude body of a woman floating in the lake's cold water during a polar bear plunge, the sheriff summed things up very well when he said, "And I thought the worst thing that could possibly happen this weekend was when the mayor killed Santa Claus!"