Lee Ofsted

Aaron Elkins, the author of the Edgar-winning Old Bones, teamed up with his wife, Charlotte, to fashion this lighthearted mystery - a fictional look at the less glamorous side of a golf tour. In this first Lee Ofsted mystery, Lee is a "rabbit" golfer in the Pacific-Western Women's Pro-Am. She made it into the tournament by the skin of her teeth and suddenly she can't keep her long drives from slicing - veering sharply to the right. She is hitting the ball perfectly and it simply isn't going where it is supposed to.

New Mexico has more than its share of unique and well-publicized attributes, but the one they prefer to play down is the fact that they lead the United States in lightning deaths per capita. Thus, the Cottonwood Creek Country Club of Los Alamos, which is hosting the High Desert Women's Classic golf tournament, takes elaborate measures to ensure that the numbers don't go up during the high-profile tournament. Nevertheless, disaster strikes.

Lee Ofsted has been hired to teach golf to the executives of a local salvage company on the bucolic Block Island. The setting is lovely, and the $1,000 a day salary will go a long way toward covering her expenses during her third year on the pro tour. But will it be compensation enough for solving a murder?

If there is one thing the young golfer Lee Ofsted doesn't have on her mind, it is her chances of being selected for the Stewart Cup Tournament ( the competition that pits the greatest American golfers, male and female, against their British and European counterparts. Lee is on no one's list of the !'greatest American golfers," so it comes as a surprise when the great Roger Finley, captain of the American team, invites her to play.

Lee Ofsted and Graham Sheldon, her ex-cop fiance, have decided to take advantage of the glorious setting of the historic Royal Mauna Kea Golf and Country Club to have a quiet wedding ceremony. But from the start things go awry, partly on account of the influx of treasure hunters determined to find the club's most famous lost possession, the Cumberland Cup, commissioned from the great Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1908. Then real disaster strikes.