Murder, She Edited

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

Mikki Lincoln is a character I can immediately identify with. She has retired from teaching but is earning extra money as a freelance editor. She is good at identifying punctuation and grammar errors and feels a compulsion to correct them. When running out on an errand she trades her “lightweight sweatpants and somewhat ratty T-shirt for jeans and a clean T-shirt with no holes.” Sounds good to me!

The cozy mystery opens with Mikki receiving a letter from a law firm informing her that she has inherited land from an almost forgotten friend of her deceased mother. There is an odd stipulation that to receive the inheritance she must locate some diaries in the farmhouse, edit them, post them on the Internet, and produce an e-book with them—all in a short amount of time. Finding the diaries is a difficult and eventually dangerous task.

I like Mikki. In spite of beginning her marriage in a time when a woman could not get a mortgage or other credit in her own name, she is a strong, independent woman. She is very intelligent, and she approaches this challenge with the same tenacity as a dog with a bone. The puzzle of where the diaries are and who wrote them leads to a potential cold case of murder and the uncovering of secrets from the past and present. Someone was willing to kill to prevent their discovery. Mikki has several concerned friends who help and protect her, and she achieves the grudging respect of the law authorities.

There is also a subplot about a steamy romance author who was a teaching colleague of Mikki’s. She wrote under an assumed name. A fan of this author wants to meet her and wants Mikki to make it happen. This addition to the story provides a little comic relief and distraction from the intensity of the main plot.

I liked Murder, She Edited from start to finish. A cozy with the main character in her early 70’s appeals to me, and I am looking forward to the next book in the series.

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Rating: 5/5

Category: Mystery

Notes: #4 in the Deadly Edits Series, but can easily be read as a standalone. I missed one of the books in the series, but it did not hamper my enjoyment of the others.

Publication: July 27, 2021—Kensington

Memorable Lines:

I bestowed what I call my “sweet but dithery little old lady smile” on him, the one I usually save for security officers at the airport and policemen who think I’m meddling where I shouldn’t.

I wondered what would happen if I didn’t correct all those silly errors. Would the Friends of the Library vote to replace me as editor? I doubted it. No one else wanted the job. Besides, I didn’t think I had it in me to spot a grammar, punctuation, or usage error and not fix it.

Ordinarily, I don’t like to badger people, but I was fed up with the runaround I’d been getting. I leveled my best former teacher’s glare at the young woman and waited for her to cave. She burst into tears.