My name is Lori Dalton. I’m 62, aggressively good pickleball player, and currently on husband number four, Scott. We’ve retired to the Door County Peninsula in Wisconsin. We live in the small community of Salmon Bay after inheriting my parents’ house. We’ve settled into retirement. On paper it’s a quiet life. On paper.
Here’s the thing about spending your career as a foreign service officer for one of those alphabet agencies in Virginia: you don’t just retire from it. The instincts stick around long after the security clearance expires. For a year or two, I’d had this itch—an unused, overqualified corner of my brain asking what, exactly, I was supposed to do with three decades of tradecraft in a town where the biggest scandal was who moved the pickleball nets.
I was working on that question, and a Brandy Old-Fashioned, at my favorite dive bar. It was the kind of place with deep-fried cheese curds so good you forgave it for the ancient four-lane bowling alley in back. I took a sip of my drink closed my eyes, savored the sweetness, and felt the air shift as someone sat down next to me.
A woman, about my age. I did the polite Midwest thing.
“Hi.”
She said hello back, eyed my drink and my curds and, I did the only decent thing a person can do with a basket that size. I pushed it toward her. Nobody finishes a basket of curds alone, and they’re a tragic reheated.
“Thanks, I’m Kim,” she said, as the bartender put an Old-Fashioned in front of her.
We talked bars, small-town gossip, pickleball. Easy stuff. And then Kim said something—one specific, deliberate sentence and without thinking, I answered with one right back.
We both went very still.
Because that sentence wasn’t small talk. It was recognition. Two women, two agencies, two entire careers we weren’t supposed to discuss, suddenly sizing each other up over cheese curds. We exchanged numbers to set up a pickleball match like perfectly normal retirees. Then we both drove home with weapons at the ready because old habits don’t retire when we do.
A week later, once we’d each quietly confirmed the other was exactly who she said she was, we were trying to beat each other at pickleball. Then the pop of the ball hitting the paddle was broken up by sound of several emergency vehicles heading down the street to the boat ramp.
We walked down to look. And there it was: the thing I’d been missing without admitting it. I found that intellectual endeavor I was looking for—a dead body and based on the blood stains, a murder to solve.
Retirement was supposed to be quiet. I’d never been so glad to be wrong.
HARBOUR OF LIES
Series: A Lori Dalton Spy and Pickleball Mystery, Book 1
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: October 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link
Lori Dalton, former agency spy, and now small town Wisconsin resident and pickleball player runs into another former spy in a local dive bar famous for their fried cheese curds. The two women feel each out and determine they have more in common than Brandy Old-Fashioned drinks and pickleball.
During their first pickleball game, they notice law enforcement lights responding nearby and decide to observe. They find a local real estate agent whose remains are hauled out of the local boat launch. Before the sheriff has a chance to erect privacy screens, they note blood on his clothing. His death is declared a homicide and the two former spies find themselves trying to solve the murder when law enforcement has no answers and may be hiding something.
What can a group of former spies do to solve their small town murder and will retirement suddenly become more dangerous than their former field work.
About the author
Alec Peche (alecpechebooks.com) is the author of 29 mystery, thriller, and urban fantasy novels. HARBOUR OF LIES is the first in a new series featuring kick-ass women in their 60s pursuing pickleball and justice. She wrote the first 25 books or so while residing in Northern California before finding a forever home and awesome friends in Green Bay, WI.