Andrews lays on the good cheer with a trowel. Even the rabbi’s wife gets a cameo.
Ornamental blacksmith/general do-gooder Meg Langslow’s Christmas activities entangle her with a fellow resident of Caerphilly, Virginia, whose domestic life is even more chaotic than hers.
Unlike Meg, who’s surrounded by members of her own cheerfully argumentative family as well as the Shiffleys, Caerphilly’s somewhat more benign version of the Snopeses, Harvey Dunlop has chosen to surround himself with stuff—objects of dubious value he can’t bring himself to throw out. So Meg, her friend Caroline Willner, Meredith Flugleman of Adult Protective Services, and other concerned members of Helping Hands for the Holidays have banded together to strong-arm, er, help and encourage him to go through his house with a shovel and relocate his treasures to an empty building Randall Shiffley owns in the hope of deep-cleaning the house and then urging Harvey to move on without moving his prized junk back in. Except for the unwelcome appearance of Morris, Ernest, and Josephine Haverhill, the cousins who seem to be Harvey’s only living relatives, the preliminaries go well. But when Meg shows up at Harvey’s for the main event in the decluttering marathon, her host is unresponsive, brained with a spittoon in his garage. As Harvey hovers between life and death, Meg plunges into his family history to uncover a motive for the murderous attack. Readers patient enough to wait for any mystery, or for that matter any significant conflict, to develop will be rewarded when their own suspicions about whodunit are proved exactly right.
Andrews lays on the good cheer with a trowel. Even the rabbi’s wife gets a cameo.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-76012-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Charming characters and settings make for a pleasant stop before trying your hand at the fudge recipes.
A kindhearted hotelier and fudge maker just can’t catch a break from murder.
Allie McMurphy is attending Mackinac Island’s first Midsummer Night’s Festival with her best friend, Jenn; her boyfriend, Rex Manning, a police officer; and her bichon-poo, Mal, when a fuss erupts over the disqualification of an entry in the competition to be named queen. On her way home with Mal, who’s afraid of the fireworks, Allie discovers the body of festival head Winona Higer, shot dead. This isn’t the first time Mal and Allie have found a corpse, and she’s developed a reputation for messing with murders, much to the displeasure of Rex, whose job description calls for him to solve Mackinac’s crimes. Despite being more than busy running her hotel and making fudge for her shop, Allie can’t resist a little snooping. The first suspects are naturally the family of the girl who was disqualified, but that kerfuffle seems a thin motive for murder. So does Winona’s argument with her gardener over her roses, which she thought he'd poisoned with the wrong fertilizer. Threatening notes to pageant judges precede another dead body, once again sniffed out by Mal. More shootings and break-ins raise the question of why the killer is targeting the festival judges. Or are these attacks just a series of red herrings to obscure a hidden motive? Allie needs to find the answer before she becomes the killer’s next victim.
Charming characters and settings make for a pleasant stop before trying your hand at the fudge recipes.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3553-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Plenty of hair-raising adventures combine with more cerebral pursuits in this enjoyable tale.
A murder on a train carries echoes of another fateful railroad trip.
Library director Lindsey Norris and her husband, Mike Sullivan, are in Chicago attending a conference. During a book restoration lecture on the last day, someone leaves a bag under Lindsey’s seat containing a first edition of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train inscribed from the author to Alfred Hitchcock, making it potentially very valuable. Lindsey turns it over to conference head Henry Standish, a man with a checkered past that’s earned him multiple enemies. Lindsey and Sully, along with Henry and many other conference participants, had taken a train from the East Coast to Chicago for the conference; now, as they settle into their roomette for the return trip, prospects for a pleasant ride turn sour when Lydia Armand—who took over Henry’s job after he was accused of fraud—turns up. That night, after some nasty verbal jousts, Lindsey hears thumping noises from the next compartment and sees a person shrouded in black in the passageway. The next morning, Henry is found murdered in his compartment. Upon the arrival of a dangerous snowstorm, the police remove passengers to a local inn near Briar Creek, Connecticut, Lindsey and Sully’s hometown, while they investigate. When the valuable book turns up in Lindsey’s laptop bag, she takes it to the police, while Sully, a boat captain, heads out in the storm to deliver food to nearby islands. Much to her consternation, Lindsey is unable to contact Sully, and a search discovers his boat drifting offshore. Clues from the boat indicate that Sully may have been spirited away, and Lindsey resolves to search for him while she seeks a motive for Standish’s murder.
Plenty of hair-raising adventures combine with more cerebral pursuits in this enjoyable tale.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593639337
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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