Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 97804252588352
Berkley Publishing
305 Pages
$6.39; $7.99 Amazon
September 3, 2013
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Merry is making a fresh start in small-town Autumn Vale, New York, in the castle she's inherited from her late uncle, Melvyn. The house is run down and someone has been digging giant holes on the grounds, but with its restaurant-quality kitchen, the place has potential for her new baking business. She even has her first client - the local retirement home.
Unfortunately, Merry soon finds that quite a few townsfolk didn't like Uncle Mel, and she has inherited their enmity as well as his home. Local baker Binny Turner and her crazy brother, Tom, blame Melvyn for their father's death, and Tom may be the one vandalizing her land. But when Tom turns up dead in one of the holes in her yard, Merry needs to prove she had nothing to do with his death - or her new muffin-making career may crumble before it starts...
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Merry Wynter inherited her Uncle Melvyn's castle in upstate New York. While it needs a lot of work, she decided to do just enough to get it sold. But when she arrived she saw giant holes all over the property. With the help of her real estate agent, Jack McGill, who has volunteered to fill in the holes, and the arrival of her best friend Shilo, Merry is determined to make it work.
But what she doesn't count on is the people in town didn't much seem to care for her uncle, nor do they care for her. Trying to make friends isn't going to be easy. At least the local sheriff's mother Gogi, who runs a retirement home, has hired her to make muffins for the residents - if she can get a license to do so; but at least it's a start. But when Gogi asks her to look into Melvyn's accident, Merry is surprised. Gogi thinks it was murder, and Merry reluctantly agrees to do so.
But it isn't going to be easy, especially since she's identified the person responsible for the holes and he later turns up dead in one of them. Now, since she was seen threatening him and it was on her property, Merry begins to wonder if Gogi isn't right. Two people are dead. How many more will there be unless she can find out the truth?...
For the most part, I enjoyed this little mystery of a woman who has left a nightmare of a job - and the rumors surrounding the reason she left - to move to a little hamlet that might welcome her. But instead she finds more rumors - this time surrounding her uncle and his death. And when a local man is found dead on her property, she soon becomes embroiled in the murder mystery.
Yet with the help of her best friend and a local real estate agent, she's beginning to unravel things that someone has worked very hard to keep hidden, and it soon she realizes that her uncle might indeed have been murdered.
But what I didn't like was the fact that the local sheriff - who at first seemed to like her (and I am sure that will grow in other books) - could actually think she committed a murder, left town, and came back to get someone to 'find the body.' Why do I say this? It's not really a spoiler, but there is a scene where Lizzie finds a camp on Merry's property, and when she leads Merry to it later, inside the tent is a body. The body has been there awhile and I assume is decomposing (because this person was missing before Merry even arrived in Autumn Vale). Yet Sheriff Grace asks Lizzie if Merry led her to the body instead of the other way around. How much sense does that make? Merry would have to arrive unknown to anyone, wander around the woods, find the camp, kill someone, then leave town (again without anyone seeing her) and come back and act like she didn't know what was going on. Especially since when she arrived in town she didn't know where the castle was and had to ask the sheriff for directions. Really? If the sheriff believes even for a minute that Merry killed someone, she shouldn't have anything to do with him. The author could have done better than this if she thought about it. Plus, Merry herself doesn't seem all that sharp on the uptake.
Then there's the ho-hum factor. It's the fact that it's always the same: the protagonist arrives to a new place from whatever she's running from, and never has any money. Never. She always arrives on the edge of bankruptcy. Just once I'd like to see her get where she's going with a healthy bank account. I'm so tired of reading about women who are struggling just to get by and have to start a new life. This time it's because she blew her money in the stock market. As I said, Merry doesn't seem to be all that sharp on the uptake.
Anyway, when all is said and done, it was written pretty well, and I liked several of the characters. I'm hoping in the next book Merry will discover that her uncle left a little money tucked away for her, but we will see.
We don't know a whole lot about Merry except the fact that her husband passed away seven years ago. They were married two years, and he's been gone over three times that length of time, but she still hasn't moved on. It sounds harsh, but they weren't married that long, and while her memories are all good, even some of those would start to fade over that amount of time; yet she keeps mourning her loss, and that's why she can't move on. I would have liked to have a bit more of a physical description than just she used to be a 'plus-sized' model.
At the last, there are a couple of recipes in the back that were just okay. (I would rather have had the recipe for the carrot muffins instead of bacon, which I'll never make). Other than this, it was an average mystery that can be read in one evening.
https://www.amazon.com/Bran-Death-Merry-Muffin-Mystery/dp/0425258831/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2431298248
More on Victoria Hamilton's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/h/victoria-hamilton/
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