Seven sisters

Meet Benni Harper…a spirited ex-cowgirl, quilter, and folk-art expert who’s staking out her own corner of the contemporary American West. She’s got an eye for murderous designs—and a talent for piecing together the most complex and cold-blooded crimes. When Benni’s stepson announces his plans to marry into the wealthy, influential Brown family, she and her husband are invited to the Browns’ sprawling ranch, Seven Sisters, to celebrate the engagement. But the party takes a tragic turn when a member of the esteemed family is murdered. While trying to unravel the feuding clan’s tangled past, Benni uncovers a shocking pattern of tragedy—and stitches a hodgepodge of clues into a very disturbing design. . . Seven Sisters, a challenging pattern that features a single six-pointed star surrounded by six identical stars, was most likely inspired by an observation of nature—the Seven Sisters is a loose grouping of stars in the constellation Taurus. Although the stars in the cluster appear to be close together, they are, in fact, quite far apart.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.