Mary Caine is pushing sixty and pulling her hair out that the one thing she counts on-the Mid-Summer Carnival may not happen this year. Mary owns and operates the General Store in Whistle, Minnesota like her father before her. She's five years sober, and taking stock of her life.

She openly adores the Mid-Summer Carnival, secretly hopes her mom, who abandoned her as a child, will return with the carnival company, and Mary passionately loves Sadie Barnes-her first love, who left town thirty years ago. Mary wants a second chance and feels like she might get it when Sadie comes back to town to take a school administer position. Interestingly, a new midway company, Transformations and Amusements arrives in town too.

Suddenly, everything goes to pieces: Big Bottom Foods Company claims they own the right to the carnival barbeque sauce recipe. No barbequed chicken at the carnival means no profits to fund scholarships. Additionally, two dead bodies are found by the lake, the sheriff suspects a serial killer, and Sadie Barnes is implicated in the plot to sell the sauce recipe and in murder.

With the help of her pilfering, talking crow named, Win and her faithful hound named, Bob Barker, Mary is determined to win back Sadie's love, exonerate her from the murder, solve the suspicious deaths, preserve the carnival, and for extra credit, help Sarah, the pregnant teen Mary has employed at her grocery store.

This general fiction romp has some mystery, small-town color, and is a love story between women who have known each other fresh out of college and now again at another stage of their lives.