DEATH OF A SIX-FOOT TEDDY BEAR
by Sharon Dunn
When a mixed bag of bargain-hunting friends head for Calamity, Nev., they don’t expect murder as an added attraction.
Ginger Salinski plans on shopping and helping her husband Earl at the Invention Expo, which is being held in the Wind-Up Hotel, along with the Squirrel Lovers’ convention. When she arrives with friends Arleta, Kindra and Suzanne, they find no air conditioning, only one of their two reserved rooms and Dustin Clydell, a greedy hotelier who’s sold Earl’s convention booth to a higher bidder. Dustin’s charm has somehow failed to impress his ex-wives or his son Xabier, an actor dismayed to find the job his father promised him involves walking around in a teddy bear costume. Someone steals the hotel guests’ jewelry, and Ginger loses her cat, who’d been stalking Binky, the water-skiing squirrel. When Clydell is found dead in the teddy bear costume, the ladies are forced to help Ginger, whose fight with Clydell over Earl’s booth has made her a suspect along with two of Clydell’s ex-wives. The gals chase the jewel thief and try to figure which of Clydell’s many enemies did him in. Their shopping skills and faith in God lead them to the answer.
The ladies of the Bargain Hunters Network (Death of a Garage-Sale Newbie, 2007, etc.) are a pleasant bunch of do-gooders stranded in a mystery that would benefit from divine intervention.