friend Iris Cobb on the floor of the kitchen at her flat in the Goodwinter Farmhouse Museum. Larry is president of the Historical Society and chairperson of the Goodwinter Farmhouse Museum, as well as owner of the local department store. He also takes up many roles in the Pickax Theatre Club. Braun writes of him as being “unprepossessing”. Apparently, it is his ordinary height, ordinary features, and ordinary coloring that makes it so easy for him to slip into a variety of roles. One of Lanspeak’s most useful traits is to carry a small notebook in which he keeps noting tasks that need to be carried out and having these executed without fail.

Vince Boswell is a man with a limp and a pronounced nasal twang, who always speaks in a voice several decibels louder than the circumstances require. He is described as “a scrawny man of middle age, sharp-eyed and sharp-nosed.” Vince carries a walkie-talkie, using it to send messages to his wife about his arrival at home for lunch. He is always making offers for help to Qwilleran that the latter finds repellent and difficult to accept.

Dennis Hough, who is Iris Cobb’s son, is a clean-cut, lean jawed young man just out of college who works for an architectural firm, and has recently fathered a child. He is shown exhibiting all the proper signs of grief and regret about his mother’s passing, but seems to fall in quite without protest with Susan Exbridge’s plans for his possible move to Moose County. Mitch Ogilvie is the night desk clerk at the New Pickax Hotel. Described as a young and “big good looking blond” man, he is a member of the Historical Society who tells Halloween stories to children at the Museum, and he is also shown to be attentive to older residents at Iris Cobb’s funeral. Arch Riker is Qwilleran’s good friend and contemporary, who is editor and publisher of the Moose County Something. He is described to have “the equanimity, thinning hair, and paunchy figure of a lifelong newspaper deskman.” Junior Goodwinter is the managing editor with “a boyish face and a boyish build … growing a beard in an attempt to look older than fifteen.” The general manager of the Moose County Something, William Allen, is a large white cat.

Among the older residents is Homer Tibbitt, still mobile at age ninety-four, but with his gait resembling a robot. He is a former school principal who now does volunteer work for the museum, and has an eighty-five-year-old girlfriend whom he marries later in the book. She is Rhoda Finney, hard of hearing and with her hair dyed a rich brown. AdamDingleberry is another very old resident who lives at the Senior Care facility in Pickax. In his wheelchair, he is said to have a “shrunken form and leathery wrinkles … sharp bird-like eyes that darted as fast as his mind.” It is his remarkable memory that allows Qwilleran to tie together important threads of the mystery.

The women characters are first represented by Iris Cobb, whose unfortunate death begins the book and its mystery. A dear friend who has been Qwilleran’s housekeeper, Mrs. Cobb is fifty-five, a slightly overweight woman always dressed in pretty pinks, and much given to baking and cooking. Her cookies are mentioned with reverence many times in the book, and it is her well-stocked freezer that keeps Qwilleran and the cats in good stead when they begin staying at her flat at the Goodwinter farmhouse. Her generosity and sweet temperament make one wish she had not been bumped off so early in the narrative. She is scheduled to open an antique shop with Susan Exbridge, who is described as curvaceous and recently divorced. Susan's complete description is more detailed:

“Susan had her hair done at Delphine's, spent money on clothes, drove an impressive car, wore real jewelry, lived in Indian Village, served on the library board of directors even though she never read a book.”

Polly Duncan is Qwilleran’s love interest in the book. She is “the pleasant-faced, soft-voiced, well-informed administrator of the Pickax public library.” A woman with a matronly figure, unstyled graying hair and a fondness for plain gray suits, she shows a softer side of herself when she adopts a little Siamese kitten whom she calls Bootsie. This produces some of the hilarious moments in the narrative. Another woman character is AmandaGoodwinter, who is said to be crotchety, rather fond of her drink, and someone “on whom every new garment looked secondhand and every hair looked purposely out of place.” However, Arch Riker enjoys her company and her décor for the Dingleberry funeral home is much admired and copied.

Verona is Qwilleran’s neighbor in North Middle Hummock, who is young, not unattractive, but drably dressed and with a soft, Southern accent. For most of the book, she is shown to live a life of quiet drudgery, cooking and caring for the boorish Vince Boswell and her pitifully fragile and precocious daughter, Baby. Towards the end, Verona develops a black eye that reveals how she may also be at the receiving end of domestic violence. Finally, there is Kristi Waffle, who stays at the Fugtree farm, has a “designer figure” dressed in grubby overalls, and an overall serious air underlined by her large eyes that “were heavy with sorrow, or regret, or worry. An interesting face!” Kristi rears goats and makes delicious goat cheese. She is also an important link in the mystery via an old and valuable family Bible.