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False Pride–follow the money
False Pride
by Veronica Heley
Do you like mysteries with very complicated plots? If so, then you’ll want to read Veronica Heley’s False Pride. Bad things happen faster than the police can keep up with them, and Bea Abbot, owner of the Abbot Agency, an employment service, finds herself in the middle of events surrounding the mysterious and secretive Rycroft family. Is this a power play or could the motive be greed or maybe revenge? Is one person behind all the crimes? Bea is forced to unite forces with her ex-husband Piers as he too is unintentionally pulled into a slew of deadly happenings.
While Bea is trying to survive threats, violence, and home invasions, she also has to deal from afar with the willfulness of her precocious ward Bernice. Romance is in the air for some of the characters, but these personal affairs take a back seat to a series of crimes so involved that the main characters unite to create a timeline to try to piece together the information they have acquired in order to discover who is behind these robberies and deaths.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Severn House for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery
Notes: #12 in the Bea Abbot Agency Mystery Series, but works well as a standalone
Publication: April 1, 2018—Severn House
Memorable Lines:
Magda reacted to difficult situations like cardboard in a downpour.
Piers managed to lever off the damaged hinges. They came away with a screech of tortured wood. It was a big, heavy door. The early Victorians had built to last. She wasn’t so sure that she would.
Bea reflected that there was no use getting at Piers for flirting. He didn’t mean it. It was something in the water. Charisma. Call it what you like. He didn’t do it on purpose.
Dead Calm–murder-suicide?
Dead Calm
by Annelise Ryan
Dead Calm centers around Mattie Winston, a medicolegal death investigator who works in Sorenson, Wisconsin’s medical examiner’s office. She is newly married to Steve Hurley, a local homicide detective. Receiving twin middle of the night phone calls from their bosses, they are summoned to the scene of an apparent murder-suicide at a motel on the outskirts of town where rooms can be rented by the hour for liaisons.
Annelise Ryan has written a mystery that moves quickly from one situation to another with lots of threads and clues along the way. How could a pharmaceutical coverup tie in? Are the victims’ spouses culpable? Has a construction crew uncovered the skeleton of an alien on Mattie and Hurley’s proposed home site? Ryan keeps the reader guessing all the way to a surprise resolution.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Kensington Books for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery
Notes: #9 in the Mattie Winston Mystery Series, but it reads well as a standalone. There is a lot of backstory, but the author does a good job of relating it quickly.
Publication: February 27, 2018—Kensington Books
Memorable Lines:
The land is out in the country; the mosquitos were apparently having some sort of convention out there all weekend, and I was on the menu for every meal.
For starters, my relationship with Emily was iffy at the time, iffy being a euphemism for a barrel of TNT connected to a short, lit fuse.
So far, our road to marital bliss has been as smooth and painless as petting a porcupine.
Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake–delectable adventure
Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake
by Sarah Graves
If the phrase “chocolate cherry cheesecake” is enticing, then you will love the cozy mystery Death by Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake. In the tiny island village of Eastport, Maine, bakers and best friends Ellie and Jake (Jacobia) fill The Chocolate Moose with delectable and aromatic chocolate goodies. Their biggest baking challenge is preparing 22 cheesecakes to be auctioned off to pay for the Coast Guard’s firework extravaganza which also includes a treat for the town’s special education students. They get to view the display from a barge.
If this were not challenge enough, Ellie and Jake discover a murdered man in their kitchen and Ellie becomes the prime suspect. This is not a simple mystery as various others in the town have links that Jake and Ellie must ferret out involving them in some life threatening situations. Jake is also in the middle of family crises, and Ellie has secret expansion plans for their business. All of these events occur during a brief time span, with little sleep, and an impending hurricane. Accompanying Jake and Ellie in pursuit of the real murderer provides the reader with exciting rides by boat and car. I’m looking forward to the next adventure in this new series.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Kensington Books for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery
Notes: Recipe for Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake is included at the end of the book.
Publication: January 30, 2018–Kensington
Memorable Lines:
Once upon a time, Ma Bell ran the phone system with ruthless, utterly monopolistic efficiency. Now any fool can start a phone company and provide the kind of high-class personal communication service once offered only by two tin cans and a length of string.
When the door banged shut behind me, I must’ve jumped a foot. But it was only the wind blowing through the sliding-glass panels that looked out over the water, skittering the scattered papers like dry leaves across the slate-tiled floor.
I followed, with my heart pulsing crazily in my throat, thinking that if only I’d known how exciting the baking business would be, I’d have taken up some more sensible activity. Sword swallowing maybe, or milking poisonous snakes for their venom.
Seeds of Revenge–perfect title for this book
Seeds of Revenge
by Wendy Tyson
Let’s just put it right out there: I am a Wendy Tyson fan and her latest book Seeds of Revenge lived up to my expectations. This is a well-crafted mystery with enough suspects to be interesting, but not so many that they overwhelm. Once more Tyson injects her legal and psychology backgrounds, along with a love of books, into this story creating a page turner.
Megan Sawyer, a former lawyer who is working toward organic certification for her greenhouse and farm and also owns a café in small town Winsome, becomes involved in solving a murder that focuses on one local family but reaches out to encompass Megan and her family as well.
Megan uses her connections with locals and the police chief, her brains, and her persistence to unravel the many threads of Seeds of Revenge. In the process she has to confront some of her own relationship issues, past and present.
Set in a wintery Christmas season near Philadelphia, the holidays play a minor role as eye candy for the story. It is not a Christmas story by any means. That is just the backdrop for a very good mystery.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Henery Press for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Mystery, General Fiction (Adult)
Notes: #3 in The Greenhouse Mystery Series; works well as a standalone
Publication: November 14, 2017—Henery Press
Memorable Lines:
The historic buildings, with their brick and stone fascia, were done up in holiday finery, and the tall streetlights wore caps of white over streams of plaid ribbon. The street was deserted at this time of night, and the snow remained untouched except for a semi-cleared path carved by the plow.
A teakettle whistled. Megan pulled it off the stove with an oversized Christmas mitt and began filling a china teapot, her mind on all the ways people could destroy the very things they loved in another person.
King was looking at her with something akin to warmth. After the traumas of last fall they’d developed a bond. She’d come to respect his abilities and toughness as a new police chief, and he seemed to appreciate her insights. It was a relationship that worked…
Smoke and Mirrors–P.T. Barnum’s American Museum
Smoke and Mirrors
by Casey Daniels
P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, stocked with the odd, unusual, and exotic from around the world, is the setting for the mystery Smoke and Mirrors by Casey Daniels. It’s the fall of 1842 in New York City when we are introduced to the fictional heroine Evangeline Barnum, a sister of Phineas T. Barnum.
Although Evangeline lives in a time of severe restrictions on women in the United States, thanks to her forward thinking brother, she works at the museum with many responsibilities. She has more freedom to pursue her investigations than most women would have. Problems begin with the appearance of an old family friend, Andrew Emerson, soliciting her help. Evangeline turns him away because his presence could cause the discovery of secrets she has worked hard to hide. The plot becomes ever more complex as Evangeline becomes involved in a murder, attempts on her life, and the disappearance of young ladies in New York City.
This was a fascinating book of historical fiction. It is well researched, has interesting characters, and provides a different perspective on the lives of the “human oddities” in live exhibits. These are the kinds of people, like the bearded lady, that one used to commonly find in fair exhibits, but are hopefully not exhibited as freaks anymore.
I would like to extend my thanks to netgalley.com and to Severn House for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: 5/5
Category: Historical Fiction, Mystery
Notes: #1 in the Miss Barnum Mystery Series
Publication: November 1, 2017—Severn House
Memorable Lines:
Her words were not light and airy, more like a cloud that foretells a coming rain; not so threatening in and of itself—not at that moment—but simply a reminder that there is a chance there are darker things to come.
It was difficult to explain how such groups of people made me feel. In the museum, whether I was talking to one or one hundred, I was at ease. Yet in such social situations, when I was expected to talk of nothing more interesting than the weather or the latest fashions from Paris, I often felt awkward and tongue-tied.
The more mysterious a thing, the more likely it is that people will pay money for it.
education pathways 