The Diva Serves Forbidden Fruit

April 15, 2021
The DIY Festival Sophie Winston's been asked to plan for Alexandria's Old Town goes off the rails when someone starts killing off her neighbors. It would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive victim than Lark Bickford, but the widowed socialite takes a fatal tumble that looks very suspicious only a day after returning from a guided tour of Portugal. Her family members are instantly scandalized--not that she may have been murdered (her body has barely cooled when they start selling off her period furniture and pricey china), but that her will includes a spendthrift trust that will keep her grown children, Bennett and Paisley, and Paisley's husband, self-styled advice guru Frank Eames, from liquidating the rest of her assets any time soon. Even more dismaying is the news that the trustee is Humphrey Brown, the secret lover whom a neighbor spotted leaving her house shortly before her corpse was discovered. The family's outrage is soon complicated by the remarkably similar death of Dulci Chapman, art therapist-turned-food blogger, who'd taken the same guided tour as Lark. So had assistant medical examiner Dr. Peter Chryssos, Sophie's friend Nina Reid Norwood, and Sophie's ex-husband, Mars Winston. Wonder how safe they are? In between complimenting most of the DIY exhibitors and fielding Greer Shacklesworth's endless complaints, the unflappable Sophie asks everyone who'll listen what the design Lark scrawled as she was dying might have meant. Lots of recipes, household tips, quaint locals, and sometimes sharp squabbles--but the big story here is bling.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.