Dead of Winter

September 18, 2017
At the start of bestseller Corsi’s entertaining third mystery set in the real-life spiritualist community of Lily Dale, N.Y. (after 2016’s Something Buried, Something Blue), Bella Jordan, Valley View Manor’s innkeeper, witnesses a killer dump a corpse into Cassadaga Lake. Bella doesn’t fully realize what she’s seen from her kitchen window until she finds the corpse on the lakeshore. The killer, an Elvis Presley look-alike, knows Bella called the police and wants to make her pay. A brutal blizzard, however, complicates his plans. During the storm, six-year-old Jiffy Arden, a friend of Bella’s son, Max, goes missing. Bella worries Jiffy wandered off again, no thanks to his absentee mother. Max is convinced Jiffy, who recently dreamed of being kidnapped on a snowy day, has in fact been kidnapped. When another body turns up, Bella fears Jiffy’s disappearance is related to the earlier murder and that he may be a victim of the Elvis look-alike. Bella’s deep love and concern for a child that isn’t her own is a nice facet to her character. The endearing town, its quirky psychic medium residents, and a hint of romance offset the slow ramp-up and carry through to a suspenseful ending. Agent: Laura Blake Peterson, Curtis Brown.

September 15, 2017
Spirit, an omniscient guide, helps residents of a small town find a missing boy who may have been kidnapped.Living in the idyllic town of Lily Dale has felt like a dream for Bella Jordan, who moved from New York City following the sudden death of her husband. Now Bella runs the Valley View Manor guesthouse and spends most of her time trying to keep Max, her young son, out of trouble. But Max is easy to take care of compared to neighbor Misty Starr's son, Jiffy, a curious kid who doesn't know when to quit. Bella prides herself on values like common sense, something Misty lacks, and she feels more like admonishing the young mother than expressing kinship with her, even though Max and Jiffy are close friends. Misty tries to keep an eye on Jiffy through his daily ramblings, but she's been distracted more than usual lately by the news that her military husband won't be home for Christmas. Michael refuses to call Lily Dale his home, and he's wary of the very idea of a guiding Spirit, even though Spirit is what brings most people to Lily Dale. In her role as a psychic, Misty is a natural believer, and even Bella finds herself thinking that Spirit may be communicating with her. When Jiffy doesn't come home from school one day as a winter storm approaches, both Bella and Misty worry that something has gone wrong, and when Max cheerfully announces that Jiffy knew he was going to get kidnapped, the two mothers must spring into action and work together despite their very different parenting styles. Though Staub's look at divisiveness within communities, especially differences over child-rearing, addresses some serious real-world concerns, the lack of focus in her small-town setting and her use of outsiders as the bad guys do little to develop the world of Lily Dale (Something Buried, Something Blue, 2016, etc.).

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October 1, 2017
Set in the real-life spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, the third entry in this cozy series once again finds innkeeper Bella Jordan in the role of amateur sleuth, the irony being that any one of her second-sighted neighbors would be better suited to the role than this perfectly normal, widowed single mother. But when a body washes up behind the hotel just days before her son's best friend disappears, Bella tries to figure out how the two events might be connected. The appeal here is not so much the actual mystery, but how it functions to bring the characters together. This warm, small-town series will appeal to fans of the Hallmark Channel's The Good Witch, starring Catherine Bell.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)