BAD HOUSEKEEPING

Dumped and depressed, a young woman must team up with her troublemaking great-aunt to solve a crime.

Agnes Blythe is anything but excited to learn that her Great-Aunt Effie has come to her small-town home of Naneda, New York. Effie has a way of finding the worst in people, and Agnes can’t help but remember the awkward moment when Effie described the teenage Agnes as beautiful for a husky girl. So of course Effie arrives just as Agnes is at her most vulnerable, having just been ditched by her professor boyfriend Roger for not being exciting enough. When Agnes hears that her aunt's inherited the Stagecoach Inn and hopes to renovate the condemned building, she’s relieved that Effie will have a distraction and may forget that Agnes lost her job at the local library. In the hope of raising some money, and maybe recapturing some of her self-esteem, Agnes stops by her old job to see if there’s any chance of her being hired back permanently. Not only is she turned down, but she has a run-in with grouchy old biddy Kathleen Todd. When Kathleen accuses Agnes of breaking a library artifact on purpose and promises to have her arrested, Agnes loses control and threatens to wring Kathleen’s neck. Though the threat isn’t meant to have weight, Kathleen is found duly strangled the next day, vaulting Agnes to the top of the suspect list. Forced to search for exculpatory evidence, Agnes must join forces with Effie, who’s also a suspect in Kathleen’s murder. Can the two clear each other’s names, or will they be each other’s undoing?

Chance once again battles the balance between wit and overkill (Teetotaled, 2016, etc.), unfortunately erring on the side of the latter.