Month: February 2019

“Poppy Harmon Investigates” – a Desert Flowers Mystery by Lee Hollis

Sixty something Poppy Harmon is newly widowed and flat broke and is living in Palm Springs, CA and forced to find a new career she decides to become a Private Investigator because – as a former TV star in a popular PI series from the 1970s – that qualifies her or at least in California it does. Her best friends, Iris and Violet, polar opposites, and Violet’s 12 year old grandson a tech whiz, all sign up to assist and a new enterprise is born in Iris’s garage. One small problem, no customers. So Poppy convinces her daughter’s boyfriend Matt, a struggling talented actor, to be the face of the business.  The ploy actually works! And they soon have a rich and well known client, a former movie star, whose house was robbed and her valuable and uninsured jewelry stolen.

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“Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake” by Sarah Graves

 There are many culinary themed cozy series and many of them make me hungry but this one takes the (chocolate) cake prize.  Maybe it’s because I am from New England and maybe it’s because I have been to Eastport and maybe it’s because I love to bake but the recipes described in this cozy sound criminally delicious.  The Chocolate Moose is the bakery café that is owned by Jake and Ellie and if you have read the other Home Repair is Murder series by Sarah Graves you know all about Jake’s story and how and why she lives in remote Eastport, Maine with her husband, her dad and her housekeeper and step-Mom, her son and daughter-in-law and the baby and all the rest of the characters.  This series continues with the same characters but takes it into a new direction with the bakery cafe, The Chocolate Moose, in this 2nd entry in the series.

Its late spring but not quite tourist season and cash is a scarce commodity in Eastport,  Maine and Jake and Ellie are afraid they will have to close the doors to their wonderful bakery café after a big order for an upcoming wedding gets put on hold when the happy couple, a Coast Guard Captain and his financee, a high school teacher are taken into custody for the murder of the town’s infamous Lothario hoodlum who was poisoned with a chocolate malted milkshake in a Chocolate Moose take-away cup.

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“Harvest of Secrets” – A Wine Country Mystery by Ellen Crosby

This series has an unusual venue, a vineyard and winery in Virginia complete with an old family home in a northern county outside of Washington, DC but in spite of the privileged setting it is also down to earth and relatable since the owner Lucie Montgomery is hands on involved in the running of her vineyard and is tireless and hard working.   The suspense starts immediately not with a death but with the preparations to finish the harvest before a category 5 hurricane arrives that weekend.  But before the storm arrives more immediate problems surface with the discovery of a buried skull in a shed, a dispute with an arrogant handsome Frenchman who feels he is in danger, the theft of papers belonging to a valued migrant worker and the results from a DNA ancestry genome test all swirl together to create foreboding clouds of secrets and danger.

The Frenchman is found murdered in the storage rooms at a prominent neighbor’s  vineyard and the primary suspect is an undocumented immigrant,  the DNA ancestry results reveals family secrets coming to light and the skull turns out to have a history going back to Civil War days and Lucie is directly or indirectly involved in all of it.  Her cousin becomes a serious suspect in the murder and Lucie fears that the skull belongs to a Civil War family member and the DNA results show an unknown close relative.

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