It's Indian summer in Santa Cruz and restaurateur Sally Solari decides an open-air painting class is the perfect way for her to learn more about Paul Gauguin, the inspiration for her family's newest restaurant. But the beauty of the Monterey Bay coastline is shattered when Sally's dog Buster sniffs out a corpse tangled up in kelp ...

Sally Solari is busy juggling work at her family's Italian restaurant, Solari's, and helping Javier plan the autumn menu for the restaurant she's just inherited, Gauguin. Complicating this already hectic schedule, Sally joins her ex-boyfriend Eric's chorus, which is performing a newly discovered version of her favorite composition: the Mozart Requiem. But then, at the first rehearsal, a tenor falls to his death on the church courtyard--and his soprano...

"When Guthrie Hewitt calls on restaurateur and private investigator Jane Lawless, he doesn't know where else he can turn. Guthrie has fallen for a girl-Kira Adler. In fact, he was planning to propose to her on Christmas Eve. But his trip home with Kira over Thanksgiving made him uneasy. All her life, Kira has been haunted by a dream-a nightmare, really. In the dream, she witnesses her mother being murdered. She knows it can't be true because the dream...