# Read the first page of Between a Book and a Hard Place by Denise Swanson

Read the opening of Between a Book and a Hard Place by Denise Swanson free, no signup. A library reopening dredges up a runaway mother.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/between-a-book-and-a-hard-place-denise-swanson
- Genre: Cozy mysteries
- Year: 2016
- ISBN: 9780451477767
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780451477767&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780451477767
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780451477767

## The opening

The Shadow Bend, Missouri, city council meeting didn’t typically draw much of a crowd. Generally, fewer than a dozen of the community’s four thousand twenty-eight citizens showed up, but tonight the residents had turned out in droves.

I wasn’t sure what had sparked more interest—the application to turn a historic hotel on the village square into a rooming house or the UFO sightings east of town. But I was willing to bet the deed to my shop, Devereaux’s Dime Store and Gift Baskets, that the majority of the folks hadn’t come to discuss the same agenda item I was there to support.

Actually, support was too strong a word. I was present only because Boone St. Onge, one of my best friends, had nagged me into attending. Normally, I would have refused to squander what might be one of the last perfect summer evenings listening to Mayor Geoffrey Eggers drone on and on about rooming houses bringing down the tone and ambience of Shadow Bend, but Boone had been hard to refuse.

At some point, his ninety-seven text messages, phone calls, and Facebook posts had gotten to me and I’d given in to his relentless campaign. Our other BFF, Poppy Kincaid, was made of sterner stuff.

Certainly, Poppy had a better excuse than mine—business rather than pleasure. My dime store closed at six on Tuesday nights, but her nightclub, Gossip Central, was open until two in the morning. I wasn’t buying it, though. She could have left her bartender in charge of the place. Instead, she claimed that the local motorcycle club’s monthly get-together required her personal touch.

Translation: She was afraid if she wasn’t there to sweet-talk them, the bikers would tear the joint apart. And the last thing she wanted was to have the cops called in to break up a fight. Poppy’s watering hole had originally been a quarter mile outside the city limits, thus in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction. But now, because of some recent restructuring of law enforcement districts, Gossip Central was in her police chief father’s territory.

Since the change, Poppy had been extra careful to keep things calm in her club. No grown woman wants her daddy coming around to save her, especially a bad girl who wasn’t on speaking terms with her father.

Which left me sitting between my friend Ronni, aka Veronica Ksiazak, and a stranger. Ronni owned the local bed-and-breakfast, and for the last ten minutes, she’d been hunched over, listening intently to the mayor’s long, boring monologue. I wondered if she was concerned that if the city council refused the rooming house permit, they might decide to rezone and disallow her B & B as well.

I’d tried to chat with the odd-looking guy next to me, but he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.

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