Betsy, who’s growing as a character, gets an especially interesting case this time.
A search for a birth mother provides the impetus for a murder in Minnesota.
Betsy Devonshire, amateur sleuth and owner of the Crewel World needlework shop, sees a startling resemblance between nurse Jan Henderson and Lucille Jones, a visitor from Texas. So does Lucille, who, looking for her birth mother, admits that she’d seen Jan at a medical conference and stolen her hairbrush for DNA tests. Jan and her mother, Susan McConnell, are in line to inherit a fortune from Susan’s eccentric Aunt Edyth, a man-hater who’s cut Susan’s brother Stewart and his family out of her will. When Edyth is found dead with the remnants of a knitting needle in her brain, Jan begs Betsy (Embroidered Truths, 2005) to help find the killer. The relatives are obvious suspects, along with Lucille and her husband, who’d hit the jackpot if she could prove she was a family member from the female side. A visit to the mansion to allow each relative to choose something shows that Stewart’s been researching the contents when his daughters all choose antiques of great value. But Stewart himself, who hopes to open a fishing business if his relatives will help finance it, picks a decrepit speedboat. An innocent choice? Hardly. An old knitted cushion on the boat hides a treasure map that holds the solution to the mystery.
Betsy, who’s growing as a character, gets an especially interesting case this time.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-425-21003-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.
Three familiar sleuths each get a turn in this trio of cozy Christmas mysteries.
First, O’Connor (Murder in Galway, 2019, etc.) dives into Siobhán O’Sullivan’s past. Just graduated from the Garda College and not due to report for duty until the New Year, she’s busy preparing for Christmas when she sees a sign advertising a missing dog and links the disappearance to that of her own family dog and others around town. When the town Santy, Paddy O’Shea, is discovered floating dead in a dunk tank he’s filled with hot chocolate, all the missing dogs are also found, waiting in vain to be part of his extravagant show. Now Siobhán must help catch Santy's killer. Next up, Day (Strangled Eggs and Ham, 2019, etc.) presents South Lick, Indiana, cafe/country store owner Robbie Jordan, whose boyfriend Abe’s father, Howard O’Neill, has secretly acquired Cocoa, a rescued Lab puppy, as a Christmas gift for Abe’s son, Sean. When Howard’s business associate, Jed Greenberg, is found dead on an icy sidewalk, tangled in Cocoa’s leash, it turns out to be murder. Though Jed had plenty of enemies, Howard is a particularly choice suspect because he’d just learned that Jed had cheated him in a business deal. In the final tale, Erickson (Death by Café Mocha, 2019, etc.) features cafe/bookstore owner Krissy Hancock, a locally renowned sleuth who reluctantly accompanies her friend Rita Jablonski to a remote warehouse, where Lewis Coates, whose attention to detail is obsessive, has installed an escape room. Each member of the small group is given their own room whose door code they must determine from cryptic clues. They all manage to escape to a large locked room where they find the corpse of Coates. A prick Krissy finds on his finger and traces to a trick mug strongly suggests that one of the players is also a killer.
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2360-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Relax, enjoy, and marvel anew at the power of unbridled fictional invention.
Rejoice, fans of American madness who’ve sought fulfillment in political reportage. South Florida’s master farceur (Skink—No Surrender, 2014, etc.) is back to reassure you that fiction is indeed stranger than truth.
Even though a prefatory note indicates that both the come-hither title and the stuff about giant Gambian pouched rats are rooted in reality, no one but Hiaasen could have dreamed up the complications arising from the collision of Merry Mansfield with talent agent Lane Coolman—a literal collision, since she rams his rented car while shaving her bikini area in the driver's seat of a Firebird. Make that multiple collisions, since Lane turns out to be only the latest victim of Merry and her partner Zeto’s kidnap-for-hire schemes. In this case, he’s the wrong victim, mistaken for beach-replenishment contractor Martin Trebeaux, whose swindling has put him on the wrong side of Calzone crime family capo Dominick "Big Noogie" Aeola. Since Coolman’s being held captive, he can’t be on hand to walk his client Buck Nance, the reality star of Bayou Brethren, though a personal appearance at the Parched Pirate, and Buck goes off script into a racist rant that sparks a demonstration and sends him fleeing, though he's still capable of inspiring Benny Krill, a murderous apprentice racist who dreams of joining him on his show. After laboring in vain to persuade Jon David Ampergrodt, his boss at Platinum Artists Management, as well as Merry and Zeto that he’s worth ransoming, Coolman escapes, but it doesn’t matter: he’s still confined in the zoo that’s Key West, where liability lawyer Brock Richardson’s fiancee loses the $200,000 ring he didn’t bother to resize after his fatter former fiancee returned it, and when his neighbor, health inspector Andrew Yancy, discovers it, he hides it in the hummus in the hope that an indefinite search for the bauble will stall Richardson’s plan to build a McMansion that will obstruct Yancy’s sea view. Etc. How can Hiaasen possibly tie together all this monkey business in the end? His delirious plotting is so fine-tuned that preposterous complications that would strain lesser novelists fit right into his antic world.
Relax, enjoy, and marvel anew at the power of unbridled fictional invention.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-34974-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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