Congratulations to Suzie Williams and Cheryl Rahkonen
Emails have been sent; please respond by the end of the week or I will need to choose new winners.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing. . . .
After a long course of kidlit, time for another bit of adult fiction, a cozy mystery. Killing Cassidy, by Jeanne M. Dams. Hardcover, 210 pages
Source: library
Summary: This is book 6 in the Dorothy Martin mystery series, and sees Dorothy returning to her old home in Hillsburg, Indiana, with her new husband (retired police chief Alan Nesbitt). The occasion is the death of an old friend, and Dorothy and Alan are shocked to find he has left a letter indicating that if he is dead, someone has murdered him. He doesn't know who, doesn't know why, but knows that someone has been trying to kill him, and would she please find out who. Naturally, they do.
Review: The Dorothy Martin series definitely falls into the "cozy" category of mystery, as well as the "older women who wear hats" category (I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm getting attracted to books about older women who wear hats, but I think I can guess). It's a pleasant, easy read with a convincing mystery (to even figure out who killed Kevin Cassidy, they have to solve the almost harder mystery why anyone would want to, not to mention how you commit murder by pneumonia), and enough suspects that I couldn't narrow it down.
The narrator (Dorothy) makes a number of references to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels, especially Gaudy Night, which as a big fan of Sayers I found fun. I think she also had Busman's Honeymoon in mind during the development of the story, because this was a classic example of what Lord Peter declares in that book, that "when you know how, you know who." Indeed. When they know how, they know who, but it took me until well after they'd revealed who to figure out how they knew. The author does do us the credit of not explaining it in too much detail, leaving it to the reader to either puzzle it out or accept their brilliant leap of intuition.
I prefer the books set in England, in some ways (always fun to have an exotic setting, though I recognize that for English readers, Indiana may be an exotic setting), but this was a very well-constructed and well-written mystery.
Four stars.
Thanks for the review. I can't read a lot of books like this in a row, but I do love an occasional "cozy" mystery (I know that's supposed to be a death blow category for a book).
ReplyDeleteHmm. I hadn't thought of the category that way, and there is certainly a large market for books that I would put into the "cozy" class (non-violent mysteries with a focus on relationships?), based on the number of them out there. The audience is not the young and hip, however. More for people like. . . well, me. You know. Women past the first flush of youth. . . never mind.
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