It started out like any other day for Max (Maxine, but only to her mother) Stryker, a crime reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Then the news broke. She was listening to the morning news on TV as she rushed to get to work when they announced that the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers had been sold. When she arrived at the office, the buzz was that their newspaper was going to go on the auction block, and a lot of the workers would be getting pink slips within days, maybe even hours. With her notice in front of her, Max called her mother and told her that she was going to be forced to do what she had vowed would never happen: she was going home! Home to Willow Creek, Minnesota, where nothing exciting ever happened--until Max hit town again, just in time to hear that the bank president had been kidnapped!
