Best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert sets this cozy mystery in the small West Texas town of Pecan Springs. As the Christmas decorating season approaches, Thyme & Seasons proprietor China Bayles feels overwhelmed. While she tries to balance her new roles of wife and step-mom with the demands of her thriving herbal shop, her business partner-and best friend-Ruby mysteriously disappears. Soon China's cantankerous mistletoe supplier Carl turns up dead....

Best-selling author Susan Wittig Albert is especially beloved for creating herbalist and ex-lawyer China Bayles. In Widow's Tears, China has urgent business to discuss with Ruby, a friend gifted with extrasensory perception. Meeting Ruby at a supposedly haunted house, China soon uncovers a mystery that may be linked to a deadly robbery that very night.

"China and Ruby Wilcox are presenting their annual ''Not Just Plain Vanilla Workshop,'' always a huge hit with customers at Thyme & Seasons Herb Shop. But someone involved with the workshop is driven by a deadly motive, and China soon finds herself teaming up with the very pregnant Pecan Springs police chief Sheila Dawson to solve a vanilla-flavored murder. Sheila, happy to get out from behind the chief's desk, is investigating the death of a botany...