Ming Tea Murder

March 16, 2015
Murder spoils the black-tie affair that opens bestseller Childs’s soothing 16th mystery to feature Charleston, S.C., tea shop owner Theodosia Browning (after 2014’s Steeped in Evil). The Gibbes Museum, of which Theodosia’s boyfriend, Max Scofield, is the PR director, is celebrating its new Chinese tea house, bought and disassembled in Shanghai and now reconstructed inside the museum, with a gala party. For the occasion, Max has persuaded the Gibbes’s director to install a photo booth, which proves quite popular with the guests, one of whom is major donor Edgar Webster, whose dead body Theodosia has the misfortune to find inside. When Max becomes a suspect in Webster’s murder, Theodosia once again turns sleuth. Realistic and down-to earth characters populate a cozy that tea lovers will relish and even coffee drinkers will enjoy. Childs rounds out the volume with a section of favorite recipes, tea-time tips, and a list of publications, websites, and blogs related to tea.

May 1, 2015
An event at the local museum to celebrate the addition of a Chinese teahouse is cut short when tea-shop owner Theodosia Browning discovers the body of a museum board member, Edgar Webster, in a photo booth at the museum. Theo's boyfriend, Max, the museum's PR director, was seen arguing with the victim about publicity for the event, but Webster had lots of enemies. His ex-girlfriend owed him money, and his wife was angry about the girlfriends. Max is laid off, an action Theo believes the museum director took to avoid attention. Meanwhile, business is booming at the tea shop with Halloween events and a new, if awkward, assignment: catering the funeral luncheon. The descriptions of the tea-shop events and the menus are likely to prove as entertaining for cozy fans as the unraveling of the mystery itself. Childs continues to balance feisty, intelligent characters with interesting folklore, relatively realistic plots (at least for a cozy), and, of course, recipes and lists of tea resources. Readers who drink more than one kind of beverage may also enjoy Cleo Coyle's coffee-shop mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)