Life in beautiful Santa Barbara County will never be the same for two grieving widows. One is serving a lengthy sentence for the bizarre tractor death of her much older, land-rich husband. The other is convinced her late-husband did not take his own life.

During Madeline’s four-month convalescence, infamous jailbird Steven Ridley—acting in his new role as California prison reformer—enlists Mike’s help to see if inmate Lindsay Bartholomew has been set up to take the fall for someone else’s depraved actions.

Santa Barbara D.A. Conrad Adams makes a personal appeal to MDPI on behalf of Natalie Sheckle, hoping Madeline and Mike can determine whether her husband died by his own hand, or if someone has stitched him up for his own murder.

Never ones to shy away from longshots or lost causes, the duo dives straight into two nearly hopeless cases. Now it’s up to them to figure out what secrets these two husbands have taken to their graves.

"The Trouble with Paradise" is the fourth book in the Madeline Dawkins Mystery Series.