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ACK and Back by Dennie Doran

ACK and Back

by Dennie Doran

Pub Date: March 14th, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480026681
Publisher: CreateSpace

Doran’s (ACK Attack, 2011) second cozy mystery featuring Maggie Marshall and her crime-solving family.

This fast, offbeat read, set on the island of Nantucket, feels like a cross between The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote. Its heroine, the 65-year-old Maggie Marshall, is a smart but somewhat graceless middle school teacher from a family of colorful characters that includes her two sisters and her flamboyant, unpredictable Aunt Amy. Maggie strikes just the right balance of toughness and sympathy in her classroom, but she has a harder time managing Aunt Amy, whose paranoid conspiracy theories were bolstered when she successfully uncovered a terrorist plot—one of several storylines referenced, a bit excessively, from the first Maggie Marshall novel. When Maggie and Aunt Amy are mistaken for undercover cops while taking pictures of local landmarks, they find themselves the target of a local Nantucket crime ring—smugglers this time. As before, the unlikely amateur detectives rely on their wits to protect themselves and expose the culprits. Dotty Aunt Amy’s excellent sleuthing skills require some suspension of disbelief, but readers may find it even more difficult to embrace the romance between Maggie and longtime family friend David Malenga. Doran later introduces another would-be suitor to make things more interesting, but she doesn’t provide enough information about Maggie and David’s history to make their relationship compelling. Some readers may also find some of the mystery’s leaps too implausible. That said, Doran shines when she focuses on her characters’ laughable, lovable foibles, and she writes funny, believable scenes with Maggie’s students as only an experienced schoolteacher could.

An often entertaining, if unevenly executed, crime caper.