State bridge champion and club woman Edie Whelan Burkett has been dealt many a bad hand, but after being widowed, the only things she has to sustain herself are a job at the library and a thousand-acre pecan grove. And just when the stress of it all seems too much, the grove's foreman dies...followed by Edie-and not by natural causes. Now, county magistrate Mac Yarbrough is on the case to prove the foreman's son innocent of murder, and figure out who's playing with a full deck-and who's not.