In her third appearance, amateur sleuth Maxey Burnell (Unsafe Keeping, 1995, etc.), editor of a Colorado weekly called Blatant Regard, proves that you can indeed go home again and even exorcise the ultimate Freudian nightmare: that your father might have killed your mother. This time out, Maxey, who's splitting with husband Reece, needs a change of scenery, and so she flies off to her old hometown in Nebraska to stay with Aunt Janet and cousin Curtis. The initial surprise is that uptight Janet is living with free spirit Scotty Springer. But surprises of a more unpleasant sort happen when Maxey noses around into the ten-year-old killing of her mother. Folks start getting very frosty when she asks about the unsolved case; then she discovers that her father Deon, whom she's thought long dead, is very much alive. And Janet saw him leaving the scene of that long-ago murder. Maxey visits him and is convinced, even when he seems wary and only guardedly affectionate, that he didn't do it. Her father seems eager, however, for her to leave the past undisturbed. But if he didn't do it, who did? An ex- lover of her mother's who wanted the affair kept secret? And what was the relationship between Mom and her childhood friend Sophie Otis? Something . . . irregular? Characters dominate, in a laid-back believable way, in a genre that's usually plot-driven. The result: a novel about small-town Americana that also satisfies as a whodunit.
Pub Date: July 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14361-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.
Too much free time leads a New Hampshire bookseller into yet another case of murder.
Now that Tricia Miles has Pixie Poe and Mr. Everett practically running her bookstore, Haven’t Got a Clue, she finds herself at loose ends. Her wealthy sister, Angelica, who in the guise of Nigela Ricita has invested heavily in making Stoneham a bookish tourist attraction, is entering the amateur competition for the Great Booktown Bake-Off. So Tricia, who’s recently taken up baking as a hobby, decides to join her and spends a lot of time looking for the perfect cupcake recipe. A visit to another bookstore leaves Tricia witnessing a nasty argument between owner Joyce Widman and next-door neighbor Vera Olson over the trimming of tree branches that hang over Joyce’s yard—also overheard by new town police officer Cindy Pearson. After Tricia accepts Joyce’s offer of some produce from her garden, they find Vera skewered by a pitchfork, and when Police Chief Grant Baker arrives, Joyce is his obvious suspect. Ever since Tricia moved to Stoneham, the homicide rate has skyrocketed (Poisoned Pages, 2018, etc.), and her history with Baker is fraught. She’s also become suspicious about the activities at Pets-A-Plenty, the animal shelter where Vera was a dedicated volunteer. Tricia’s offered her expertise to the board, but president Toby Kingston has been less than welcoming. With nothing but baking on her calendar, Tricia has plenty of time to investigate both the murder and her vague suspicions about the shelter. Plenty of small-town friendships and rivalries emerge in her quest for the truth.
An anodyne visit with Tricia and her friends and enemies hung on a thin mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0272-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
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