Happy Halloween everyone!!
I decided that in order to help you get in the holiday spirit, I’m going to share my review on a Halloween themed murder mystery novel I read recently. Of course, you don’t have to wait for Halloween to read something a little spooky, but is there a more appropriate time of the year? I think not!
Candy Corn Murder (A Lucy Stone Mystery) by Leslie Meier
Published: August 25, 2015
Book Details: Halloween is coming to Tinker’s Cove, Maine, and local reporter Lucy Stone is covering the town’s annual Giant Pumpkin Fest for the Pennysaver. There’s the pumpkin-boat regatta, the children’s Halloween party, the pumpkin weigh-in…even a contest where home-built catapults hurl pumpkins at an old Dodge! But not everything goes quite as planned…Lucy’s getting very annoyed that her husband Bill and his friend Evan have been working seemingly nonstop on their potentially prize-winning pumpkin catapult. But when the day of the big contest arrives, Evan is nowhere to be found…until a catapulted pumpkin busts open the trunk of the Dodge. Amid the pumpkin gore is a very deceased Evan, bashed in the head and placed in the trunk by someone long before the contest started.
Bill is on the hook for the Halloween homicide—he was the last one to see Evan—so Lucy knows she’s got some serious sleuthing to do. The crime’s trail seems to always circle back to Country Cousins, the town’s once-quaint general store that’s now become a big Internet player. Though the store’s founder, Old Sam Miller, is long gone, his son Tom and grandson Trey now run the hugely successful company. But whispered rumors say things aren’t going well, and Lucy finds that this case may have something to do with an unsolved, decades-old Miller family mystery…
With each new lead pointing her in a different direction, Lucy sees that time is quickly running out. If she wants to spook the real killer, she’ll have to step into an old ghost story…
Book Links: Amazon | Amazon UK | Goodreads
My Review – Candy Corn Murder
Candy Corn Murder is a Halloween themed Lucy Stone mystery. A small town called Tinker’s Cove is gearing up to have their first annual Giant Pumpkin Fest and everyone’s freaking out. The men in town are overly protective of their growing pumpkins when things start to go wrong in the days leading up to the competition. There’s all sorts of murder happening, both pumpkin and man. When Lucy’s husband ends up as a prime suspect, it’s up to her to do some sleuthing. Can she figure out in time who’s behind the murder and what their motive was?
This was a well-written and developed murder mystery that was quite enjoyable. I was a bit disappointed that the back book cover description gave away too many details pertaining to the murder, but I enjoyed reading along to find out why he was murdered and how it happened. This was the 22nd novel in the Lucy Stone Mystery series but, as I did, can be read alone.
About the Author – Leslie Meier
Author Bio:
I started writing in the late ‘80s when I was attending graduate classes at Bridgewater State College. I wanted to become certified to teach high school English and one of the required courses was Writing and the Teaching of Writing. My professor suggested that one of the papers I wrote for that course was good enough to be published and I sent it off to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s Department of First Stories. I got $100 for the story and I’ve been writing ever since. The teaching, however, didn’t work out.
My books draw heavily on my experience as a mother of three and my work as a reporter for various weekly newspapers on Cape Cod. My heroine, Lucy Stone, is a reporter in the fictional town of Tinker’s Cove, Maine, where she lives in an old farmhouse (quite similar to mine on Cape Cod!) with her restoration carpenter husband Bill and four children. As the series has progressed the kids have grown older, roughly paralleling my own family. We seem to have reached a point beyond which Lucy cannot age–my editor seems to want her to remain forty-something forever, though I have to admit I personally am dying to write “Menopause is Murder!”
I usually write one Lucy Stone mystery every year and as you can tell, my editor likes me to feature the holidays in my books. Of course Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year and my newest mystery (released September 2013)is called “Christmas Carol Murder”. I have always loved the Alistair Sims movie version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, so I was excited to be able to have Lucy encounter some modern day versions of Dickens’ classic characters. In addition to the recent holiday mysteries I have written such as “Chocolate Covered Murder” (Valentine’s Day) and “Easter Bunny Murder”, I have written an armchair travelogue mystery in which Lucy and her friends travel to London, “English Tea Murder”. Since I love to travel, I was fortunate to convince my editor that Lucy absolutely had to go to Paris, and “French Pastry Murder” is in the works. ”
My books are classified as “cozies” but a good friend insists they are really “comedies of manners” and I do enjoy expressing my view of contemporary American life.
Now that the kids are grown — I now have four grandchildren — my husband and I are enjoying our empty nest on Cape Cod which we share with our new kitty, Sylvester.
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