Even more harrowing, she makes the last leg of a cross-country flight piloting a crippled plane, with the terrified little girl as a passenger. Once you get past the improbable premise of a novice in sole command of a delicate operation like this, it's O.K. to relax and enjoy the action. McCone thrives on daredevil stuff, like being caught behind the stick in a treacherous downdraft over the Tehachapi Mountains. But she hasn't lost her taste for quiet chills, like walking through an airplane graveyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert. In this familiar terrain, imperious matriarchs change their wills, leaving all their loot to charity and cutting off the children without a cent.
Fractious heirs drink too much and squabble over dock space for their sailboats.
Crotchety old uncles shake their canes, muttering dire imprecations against the younger generation. And in the dead of winter, everybody bundles up in L. L. Bean gear and trundles outside into the bitter cold for the annual Christmas Bird Count of the local Audubon Society. Ms. Borthwick does this sort of thing beautifully in her durable series, which she sets in a small town on the coast of Maine. Her plots are more intricate than most in this genre, the task here being to find the link between a saintly philanthropist and two drunken lowlifes, who all drowned at sea in the same storm. Best of all, the literacy level is high enough to support the odd bookish quip.