The Bee Balm Murders

March 21, 2011
At the start of Riggs's beguiling 10th Martha's Vineyard mystery (after 2010's Touch-Me-Not), beekeeper Sean McBride, who tends the seven hives in 92-year-old Victoria Trumbull's west pasture, refers a new boarder to herâentrepreneur Orion Nanopoulos. The genial Orion, who pays without protest about double the usual rate for an attic room with no TV in Victoria's comfortably ramshackle West Tisbury house, heads a project to lay fiber-optic cables across the island. After his main prospective investor, Brooklyn construction tycoon Angelo Vulpone, turns up dead in a work ditch, the victim's family hires Victoria to investigate, while Orion contends with the confidence artists circling vulture-like around his project's newly gaping financial shortfall. Scenes set off-island may lack the convincing detail of those on the Vineyard, but the author's charismatic heroine and assured prose more than compensate.

April 1, 2011

Another adventure for Martha's Vineyard's oldest sleuth.

Victoria Trumbull's boarder Orion Nanopoulis has started laying a fiber-optic network across the island. He's big on plans but short on cash, and his troubles only grow when one of his potential investors is found murdered in a cable ditch. Angelo Vulpone may have had mob connections, but his two sons, convinced that his death was not a mob hit, hire Victoria, 92, to ferret out the truth. It seems that Orion has been bamboozled by sly Dorothy Roche, who with the help of a young venture capitalist is trying to hijack the company. Another possible investor who has a past history with Vulpone also wants a share in the company. None of the suspects are quite who they claim to be. So Victoria welcomes the skills of a young computer hacker the Vulpone brothers have provided to help her winkle out the murderer.

Another valentine to the beauties of Martha's Vineyard and the wintry Victoria (Touch-Me-Not, 2010, etc.), who solves the featherweight mystery as handily as any 92-year-old.

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