Genre: Mystery
Hardcover; Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781597221191; 9780425203590
Berkley Publishing
273 Pages
Various; $7.97; $7.99 Amazon
June 7, 2005
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Kelly Flynn would be the first to admit her life in Washington, D.C., is a little on the dull side. But coming back to Colorado for her beloved aunt's funeral wasn't the kind of excitement she was seeking. The police are convinced that her Aunt Helen's death was the result of a burglary gone bad, but for the accountant in Kelly, things aren't just adding up. After all, why would her sensible, sixty-eight-year-old aunt borrow $20,000 just days before her death? With the help of the knitting regulars at House of Lambspun, Kelly's about to get a few lessons in cranking out a sumptuously colored scarf - and in luring a killer out of hiding...
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Kelly Flynn returns to Colorado from her job in Washington, D.C., to handle the estate of her Aunt Helen, who was killed during a burglary gone wrong. The problem is that Kelly doesn't believe it was a burglary at all. The person in custody for the murder had no reason to kill her aunt; and there's questions unanswered.
Who took the heirloom quilt that has been hanging on the wall for as long as Kelly remembers? Where is the $20,000 that Helen supposedly had borrowed, but none of the money was found? These, and more are questions that the police either don't know the answers to or don't care, but Kelly and her newfound friends - the ladies that her aunt had been knitting with - are sure that there's something else afoot, and they're willing to do whatever it takes to help her find the truth...
While this book had an interesting premise and I wanted to read it for that reason, it never really seemed to grab my attention and keep it for any length of time. Perhaps it was the fact that I felt overwhelmed by all the descriptions of yarn and knitting which seemed to be a constant throughout the book and pretty much took first place over the murder.
At any rate, every time I was interested in something related to the murder, here comes something else about knitting. While I enjoy "themed" cozies, I just couldn't stick with this one; maybe the characters weren't interesting enough; none of them seemed "real" to me - and I never felt that Kelly was someone you could 'cozy up to' at all; she seemed rather standoffish throughout the entire book. Perhaps it was because she didn't seem to have a sense of humor about anything? The fact that she worried about every little thing that happened? That she never seemed to warm up to Steve (no chemistry); and that detracted quite a bit for me; it made the 'knitting lessons' a little less interesting because I didn't find the characters to be so.
I also thought that there were an awful lot of characters for an initial book; and I really wondered if any of them did anything else with their time than knit. I even began to wonder if they actually had full time jobs or were just temps somewhere. I also wondered why they would be so willing to do all they did for Kelly not having known her (and since she visited her aunt, why didn't anyone know her? Did she never leave the house?). They were all so willing to go to the ends of the earth for a virtual stranger - but maybe that's because they had no social life outside the knitting group and thought this is what people do.
I also know that Kelly said she spent a lot of money on her father's illness, but it had been three years since he passed, so shouldn't she have been able to save something? After all, she worked for a high-powered CPA firm and admitted that she had no social life, so unless she was heading to Atlantic City and blowing her money, she should have had something in the bank yet she cried poor. It didn't ring true. It was also odd that her aunt sold the barn, sold land for a golf course, etc.; yet didn't have any savings of her own, either. You'd think with the property she sold she would be sitting pretty. What did she do with her profits?
At any rate, while it was written well and the plot decent, I still felt that this could have been better. However, since it is the first in the series and I see that it has progressed along, I would hope that it has improved quite a bit, and Kelly finally has a personality to recommend her.
https://www.amazon.com/Knit-One-Kill-Knitting-Mysteries/dp/042520359X/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2412076617
More on Maggie Sefton's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/maggie-sefton/
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