Review - Mother's Day Murder

Title:  Mother's Day Murder

Author:  Leslie Meier 

Series:  Lucy Stone Mystery #15

Genre:  Cozy Mystery

Publisher:  Kensington Books

Format:  Kindle

No. of pages:  234

Published:  2009

My Rating:  4 Stars

DESCRIPTION:

Two of her four kids may be out of the nest, but Lucy Stone knows only too well that mothering is a lifetime commitment. At least she gets to kick back and enjoy a fancy Mother’s Day brunch with her brood—that is, before the festivities are interrupted by a nasty scene courtesy of Barbara Hume and Tina Nowak. Opposites in every way, the only thing these mean moms have in common is the need to best each other at every turn, using their teenage daughters as pawns in elaborate games of one-upsmanship

Even after witnessing the women’s claw sharpening rituals, Lucy never expects to see actual blood spilled—until Tina is shot dead on the public tennis court. Now Lucy is determined to unravel the close-knit knot of suspects. But when the threads threaten to entangle one of her own, Lucy will come face-to-face with a killer who has a thing or two to learn about motherly love…

Link to purchase the book

MY THOUGHTS:

Aaah, it is Mother’s Day and Lucy Stone is having an an enjoyable day with her family. While eating out, the nice atmosphere in the restaurant is disturbed by a woman upset that she and her family didn’t get a specific table. The woman, Barb Hume, and the woman she was sniping at, Tina Nowak, already had bad reputations. As a matter of fact, they were known ad mean moms.

When one of them is shot dead in a public place, Lucy, the ever-enthusiastic amateur sleuth, is bound and determine to getting to the bottom of things.

I am quite familiar with Lucy, as I have read each book in the series to-date. I enjoy her efforts at balancing her insatiable need to solve murders, all while being a busy housewife, mother and reporter. I enjoyed this story for the most part, and was rather saddened when the killer was identified.

This was a fast-paced read that I devoured in one sitting. The next book in this series is Wicked Witch Murder. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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  . 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 “Eggnog Murder,” is included in an anthology with two other Christmas novellas by Barbara Ross and Lee Hollis. I’ve long been a fan of the classic English country house mystery, and was a faithful watcher of “Downton Abbey,” so I couldn’t resist trying to write one. I think I succeeded rather well, if I do say so myself, with “British Manor Murder,” which came out in October, 2016.

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 — we have five fabulous grandchildren — my husband and I are enjoying dividing our time between Braintree and Cape Cod, along with our cat, Sylvester.

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