Genevieve (Genna) Summerford, a young psychotherapist from a socially prominent family, and her beau, Simon Shaw, a captain in the Tammany political machine and the proprietor of a fledgling horse farm in upstate New York, are at an auction in the City, where Simon’s first yearling is up for bid. While they’re celebrating Fair Corner Farm’s first successful sale, Genna’s longtime friend, Bartie Matheson, learns that his oyster business–owning father, Edgar, has just died in an accidental fall down the stairs. Within several days of the funeral, Bartie and his brother, Ned, have their grief-stricken mother placed in a private sanitarium. When Genna, under the guise of a family medical consultant, visits their mother, she realizes that not only has May been misdiagnosed as a hysteric, but also that Edgar’s fatal plunge involves some serious questions. As she delves more deeply into the oyster industry on Long Island Sound, she discovers that the business is rife with rivalries, thievery, and unsavory machinations that could point to murder. Threaded throughout Overholt’s intriguing cozy mystery (part of the Dr. Genevieve Summerford Mysteries series) are Genna’s and Simon’s painful backstories and the ongoing challenges of their socially unconventional relationship. She’s of high breeding, while he’s a Catholic Irish immigrant who once worked as her father’s stable boy: “pedigree isn’t everything,” he pointedly remarks to a blue-blooded horse fancier. While low on dramatic tension, the novel firmly confronts the endemic mistreatment of female patients by the medical community and misogynistic attitudes toward female physicians. The most fascinating element is the author’s intricate depiction of the surprising complexities of the oyster industry on Long Island Sound. The novel is breezily narrated by Genna, whose voice reveals a woman who knows her own mind and is determined to stand up to family and societal constraints.