My wife says that I don't understand Tyler books. If you don't go by the romance section in the book stores and don't have a spouse who goes there, you may not have heard of Tyler, Wisconsin. According to the back of "Blazing Star," one of twelve books in the series, "Each book set in Tyler is a self-contained story; together, they stitch the fabric of a community." Self-contained story? That's like trying to catch up with a soap opera in a week. These stories are as tangled as Blake Carrington's love life. Tyler is also "America's favorite hometown." Considering it doesn't actually exist, its claim to that title seems a little dubious. So does Dallas's claim to be America's football team, but at least there is a Dallas football team. (The Patriots, isn't it?)
    So here's what I think I know about Tyler. Forty years or so ago, somebody got bumped off. Her body has turned up recently and all of Tyler's cops are out to catch the murderer. Now, why? 1. Whoever did it didn't kill anyone else, as far as we know. But it took forty years to figure out that the first body was dead, so who knows? 2. Wisconsin doesn't have a death penalty, so all you could get this killer is life. If the killer was thirty at the time, the poor guy (or gal - this is Tyler, after all) is around seventy now. What's the point of a life sentence? 3. After forty years of not even investigating, the odds on turning up anything useful are pretty small. 
    Besides (get out a note card to follow this) the Tyler police department, run by Chief Schmidt, went out of business when the chief retired because the town couldn't afford to run it. So the Sugar Creek County Sheriff (like these place names? Believable, huh?) takes over the department and makes it a substation. Everybody thought Brick (another probable name) Bauer would take over, because he was Chief Schmidt's second-in-command, even though he was only a lieutenant, but this foxy sheriff's captain is assigned instead. So she tosses Brick over a chain-link fence to introduce herself and he gets the hots for her and she has the hots for him but it would all be unprofessional if they actually had an affair. So they get married instead. Then he decides she's a weak cop and tries to get her fired. But she saves his life and everything is okay, except they still don't know who murdered the dead woman forty years ago. And that's just one story.
    There are also stories about an American Indian and a developer's daughter who have the hots for each other but he doesn't want her dad to build on tribal land and she wants him to dance for his father, and the mechanic and the other rich guy's daughter have the hots too. As far as I can tell, somebody has a fatal heart attack in almost every book, so the town ought to be deserted by book four ((Monkey Wrench, the carpenter and the rich girl), except that long-lost sons and daughters who went to college and moved away keep coming home for the funerals and decide to take over the family businesses and marry the man/woman who deserted them/disappeared in the war/married someone else who betrayed him/her.
    Also, everybody lives at the Kelsey Boarding House. It's a cozy place, with some four or five hundred guests, all waiting to die of heart attacks so their sons and daughters can come home and run the family businesses and get married, except for the single people in the boarding house, who are waiting for the old ones to die so the sons and daughters can come back to town and they can keep rekindling old flames for whom they still have the hots.
    Everybody is descended from Granny Rose, who is also dead by book five or so. Everybody is a cousin to everybody else, officially second cousins. But with inbreeding and affairs and lies about who is really the father of whom, I suspect that, genetically, they'd all come out the same except for gender. And I wonder about that, too, sometimes. And, since everyone appears to have sex at the Kelsey Boarding House, possibly with Granny Rose, I suspect the fabric of the community is the quilt on Granny Rose's bed. I mean, follow the clues. Each Tyler book has a quilt square on the cover. Everybody has sex. So the quilt must tie all the sex together. That's a lot to ask of one quilt. 
    About that quilt, too. If there are twelve squares and it's a three-square by four-square quilt, those squares must be about eighteen inches on a side. Those are awfully big squares for a quilt.
    The Tyler series is very popular, especially with my wife, who buys them, and Harlequin Romances, who sells them. There's even a "cherished Tyler necklace," but I haven't figured out who cherished it before it was even offered, so the people who sell it would know it was cherished. (This is a lot like a Bradford Exchange Recommendation in Good Housekeeping. They recommend everything. I think they would recommend "Old Food Not Scraped Off Of A Plate.") I'm sure the series will eventually tell us who the dead body is and who killed her and why and how long the killer's been dead, and I bet the killer is Granny Rose.