Thread and Dead

August 1, 2020
This second in Penney's Apron Shop series (following Hems & Homicide, 2019) is a sharply written effort featuring Iris Buckley, her grandmother, and their fabric shop, Ruffles & Bows, in a prosperous Maine seaside village. As a mystery, it begins auspiciously. Asked too examine items left by a woman who married rich, Iris notices something odd: the wonderful fabrics have monograms from the woman's impoverished single days. And there are costly jewels sewn into the hems. Then a lovely young woman dies during a rock-climbing outing, and the police suspect murder. We're on our way, but not to a foursquare crime novel. This is a novel of female friendship, and we watch as Iris and her friends from the shop eat, watch a parade, attend a festival, and lament failed romances. In the last 100 pages, criminality breaks through, with vandalism, a chase, a drugging, and revelations about jewels and monograms. Then it's off to a dinner dance and a fashion show, where the killer is revealed in a fine, tense scene. Cozy fans will love it all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2020
Money is the root of all, or at least most, evil in a little Maine town. Iris Buckley and her grandmother own a vintage apron and linen shop in Blueberry Cove. Soon after Eleanor Brady, mistress of the large and rather decrepit Shorehaven Cottage, invites Iris to her home to look at a fascinating collection of old European sheets and other linens she wants to sell, she entangles Iris in a far more ambitious venture: arranging the sale of the trunks full of vintage clothing her mother brought from Belgium when she emigrated. Why Claudia de Witte, who worked as a nursemaid after she arrived, had such a trove of expensive clothing is just one of the puzzles that Iris and her friends must solve. Eleanor is renting rooms to several academics--Belgian Dr. Lukas de Wilde and his ambitious teaching assistants, Hailey Piper and Theo Nesbitt, who are working on a project to grow and harvest seaweed for food and fuel--along with putative seaweed farmers Jamaica Jones and Patrick Chance. The morning after attending a cocktail party complete with seaweed treats, a reluctant Iris goes climbing with her boyfriend, Ian, and her bestie, Madison, and spots the body of Hailey Piper dead on a ledge. Helping the police and researching Eleanor's past soon put Iris and her friends in danger from someone willing to kill again. Varied characters and seaweed lore enliven a mundane cozy that leaves lots of room for future plot and character development.

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