Rose Malone is doing all right except that her daughter is struggling with PTSD, her lover is leaving her for the Appalachian Trail, and there's a rumor that there's a million bucks in the building she inherited which has inspired every money-hungry man in her weird little town to bring her cheap flowers and offer to search the place for her.

Max Reddy needs to get back to the Appalachian Trail; it's hard to recover from a life of covert operations when you're in a community of ex-agents. But that community also has a woman and her daughter he cares about more than he thought possible. If he hadn't made it his mission to finish walking the Trail, he might stay, but he always finishes what he starts.

Then Max finds one of Rocky Start's citizens dead in a coffin, and suddenly Max and Rose are after a killer in a town where a large percentage of the population is retired assassins. There's the funeral director, the exterminator, the postmaster, the postmistress, the honey store owner, and the femme fatale, not to mention the handsome outsider journalist poking around for a story about serial killers.

And now the killer is aiming at new targets: Rose and Max.

Very Nice Funerals: Send flowers. Express your sympathy. Duck.

Think of the movie RED. Retired covert operatives living in a small town in the Smoky Mountains. What could go wrong? From the bestselling authors of Agnes and the Hitman and the Liz Danger series.

Rose Malone's landlord and employer, Ozzie Oswald, just died, and now she has no idea if she has a job or if she and her daughter, Poppy, have a place to live, and that's on top of the arrest warrant that's been out for her for nineteen years. Then a stranger shows up claiming to be Ozzie's son and tries to throw her out, so she swings a reproduction of the Maltese Falcon at him, and just as she's about to finish him off in a rage, somebody grabs him and throws him into the street.

Max Reddy just wants his boots. He's walking the Appalachian trail with his dog Maggs and stopping for them in Rocky Start when he sees a feisty middle-aged woman swinging a Maltese Falcon at a guy who backhands her. Max throws the guy into the street and continues on his way, determined to get his boots and get out of town, even if Feisty is pretty cute. He's been alone on the Trail a long time. Some trees are looking good to him.

All Rose wants to know is what's going on, so she follows Max to the post office, no ulterior motive, honest. Except to pick his pocket to find out who he is, then he can go. But by nightfall, she's invited him under her roof for her own protection since theyre dealing with a town full of retired spies, including a sly-eyed moocher, a suspicious sheriff, a knife-wielding bakery owner, a strange woman who looks like a vampire, a conniving teenager, and a dog whos decided shes done with the Appalachian Trail. And Max is starting to think his dog is right.

Rocky Start: This could be the start of something dangerous.