Middle-aged, Bronx-born New York detective Dave leaves the violence of the city streets for a change of pace as investigator for the district attorney's office in the small Southwestern town of Mesa Grande. But he soon encounters as much mayhem, and even more hostility, prevarication, and cynicism in an unlikely spot: the English department of Mesa Grande College. When Stuart Bellamy, scion of a distinguished family and recently tenured English professor, is bludgeoned to death with a bronze paperweight, suspicion falls on likeable professor Mike Russo, who was passed over for tenure in favor of Bellamy. Dave begins a tentative investigation of the case and is given pointed advice by an astute, highly intelligent, intuitive source: his visiting mother. Now in her 70s, Mom is a tough, shrewd New Yorker with a wry wit and an ability to mix keen analytical deductions with her more traditional talents as cook, mother and matchmaker. This fast-paced mystery contains a rich trove of sharply etched supporting characters who animate the plot with caustic wit and imaginative ploys. Of course, Mom steals the show.

Not only was Dave's mother a great cook, but she had an amazing knack—between the chopped liver and the strudel—for solving his most difficult murder cases. Possibly because no detail, no matter how trivial, ever escaped that rattrap brain of hers. — When the Reverend Chuck Candy is found dead three days before Christmas, it's more than ill-timed murder. It's a complex case of religious fanaticism, illicit affairs and small-town bigotry. Dave—an investigator for the public defender—believes an innocent man is being framed. And he knows only one person in Mesa Grande, Colorado, can untangle the web of unlikely connections and sinister intentions: Mom.

Dave, a middle-aged, ex-New York City detective, calls on his seventy-five-year-old mother to help him find out if ""murder will out"" when one of the actors in the cast of a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth is found dead.

Relying on his Mom's homespun wisdom and sharp logic to help him find solutions to his cases, public defender's investigator Dave attempts to unravel the murder of a local madam.

Such a Mystery! Mom never wanted her son Dave to become a policeman. "For all the brains it takes, believe me, you might as well be in business with your uncles." Besides, "All those gangsters and dope fiends and bookies and hatchet murderers and other such goniffs; isn't it possible you could get hurt some day?" It's not difficult to solve crimes, Mom explains—and it's certainly not for her. Dave and his very superior, Wellesley-educated wife, Shirley, have dinner with Mom in the Bronx every Friday evening. Between the chicken soup and the schnecken, Dave talks about his current cases. Mom is not interested in what she describes as sophie-ological analysis and psycho-annihilating the suspects, but her long experience in dealing with scheming butchers, nosey neighbors, and eccentric relatives leads her to a logical solution to all Dave's mysteries. "By yourself, you should've guessed it," Mom says, but it takes Mom's insight into personality to unravel the crime. Thirty years ago, Ellery Queen wrote that it was "sure as death and 'tectives" that a collection of Mom short stories would appear. Witty, wise, and filled with warmth, the Mom tales are some of the finest armchair detective stories ever written.