While Sunni Taylor is embroiled in her own personal turmoil with Detective Brady Jackson, she's handed a new assignment to cover a longstanding feud between two families, the Plunketts and Carmichaels. A decades-long fight over water rights seems like rather lackluster fodder for a newspaper story, but when the feud devolves into secret trysts and plotted murders, Sunni finds herself deep in the thick of it all. It seems, once again, Sunni is thrown into Jackson's path. For the moment she pushes aside her broken heart and muddled head. She has a murder to solve and a story to write. But things turn frightening when the investigation puts her directly in the path of a ruthless killer. Book 8 of the Firefly Junction Cozy Mystery series. More in the series: 1. Death in the Park 2. Killer Bridal Party 3. Murder at the Inn 4. A Humbug Holiday 5. Calamity at the Carnival 6. Double Trouble 7. Havoc at Wildwood Manor 8. Fatal Feud 9. Trick or Trouble 10. A Crafty Killing 11. Death at the Museum

Homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. Making Murder Public explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the 'politics of murder', Making Murder Public examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized between 1480 and 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners' inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from 1480 to 1680. Making Murder Public argues that homicide became fully 'public' in these years, with killings seen to violate a 'king's peace' that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the 'public peace' or 'public justice.'