Hemlock Falls Mystery No 17
Claudia Bishop
Berkley Prime Crime
April 2012/978-0-425-24707-5
Mystery/Cozy
Amazon
Reviewed
by Laura Hinds
Hemlock Falls, NY is a tourist Mecca. Filled with unique shops
and a cooking academy, it is also home to the Inn at Hemlock Falls.
Sisters Meg Quilliam and Sarah Quilliam-McHale run the inn that
boasts twenty seven rooms. The sisters will soon host the wedding
of Rose Ellen, who owns the new shop, Elegant Antiques, and Edmund
Tree, acerbic host of TV's "Your Ancestor's Attic."
An episode of "Your Ancestor's Attic" is to be recorded
in the Hemlock Falls High School auditorium just two days before
the wedding. The event would bring out the media, but it also brings
Tree's rival Belter Barcini, host of Pawn-O-Rama, a rival TV show,
to town. The men decide to have a cooking competition, to be taped
for both shows. During the contest taping, Edmund Tree drinks some
punch that was poisoned and he dies on the spot.
Over the years, Meg and Sarah have acquired skills in unearthing
clues and questioning murder suspects. Will they be able to solve
this crime and keep their crime-busting record intact? Or is danger
heading their way when they snoop a little too much?
I found this to be a fast-read, chock full of quirky characters
and offbeat situations. I particularly liked the subtle comparisons
of cooking rivals Clarissa Sparrow and Meg Quilliam and the rivalry
of Tree and Barcini. Longtime fans of this series will be thrilled
to have another installment set in Hemlock Falls. Newbies to the
series will most certainly want to make time to read the sixteen
previous books.
Reviews of other titles in this series
Buried
by Breakfast, No 12
A
Carol For A Corpse, No 14
Dread
on Arrival, No 17
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