Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781496713278
Kensington Publishing
288 Pages
$7.99; $1.99 Amazon
March 27, 2018
⭐⭐⭐
Pamela is hosting the next Knit and Nibble meeting and can't wait to liven up her otherwise empty home with colorful yarn, baking, and a little harmless gossip. She even recruits Amy Morgan, an old friend who recently moved to town, as the group's newest member. But on the night of the gathering, Amy doesn't show. Not until Pamela finds the woman dead outside - a knitting needle stabbed through the front of her handmade sweater...
Someone committed murder before taking off with Amy's knitting bag, and Pamela realizes that only she can spot the deadly details hidden in mysterious skeins. But when another murder occurs, naming the culprit - and living to spin the tale - will be more difficult than Pamela ever imagined...
✽✽✽✽✽✽✽✽
Pamela Paterson is a widow who lives in a small town with a daughter in college and whose social life consists of a knitting group that meets once a week. It's a varied group that includes both the wealthy and those not so much, but they all have one thing in common, and that's their knitting.
When Pamela is leaving the local co-op grocery she sees an old colleague of her late husband's who helped her get through her grieving, and invites her to join the group. But Amy Morgan never shows up, and Pamela wonders what happened. She doesn't have long to wait, as when she's searching for the small kitten she's been feeding outside, she comes across Amy - dead in the bushes, stabbed with a knitting needle.
Now Pamela is curious who wanted to kill Amy, and why. And when there's another murder, she's convinced the two are connected, even though the police don't. So it's up to Pamela and her friend Bettina to find the truth before someone else gets killed...
This book could have had so many possibilities, but wasted them. It wasn't a bad book, not at all; but it missed opportunities and there were several things that bothered me.
First, I don't really approve of underage drinking. Her daughter is eighteen, and Pamela has no problem giving her wine, because he daughter thinks since she's a college student it somehow makes it okay for her to do so. Really? Underage drinking is fine in Pamela's book? It's not in mine. Sorry, but I wouldn't give a teenager a drink any more than I'd hand a twelve-year-old my keys and tell them to take the car.
Secondly, Pamela was extremely rude to her neighbor, Richard Larkin. She just decided that her friend Bettina was 'setting her up' so when he asked a couple of the neighbors in the day after Thanksgiving for an after-Thanksgiving dinner, she decided not to go because of it. That's just so rude. She doesn't want to have anything to do with him because after her husband has been dead five years, she's not ready to date. Fine. But to not go? Not fine.
Then, where were the police in this story? They were rarely in it at all, and only on the periphery. It's as if they didn't care that people had died, they didn't give any indication they were investigating. We were told they were asking questions, but we weren't made a part of those questions so we could figure out for ourselves who the murderer was by the responses. In a mystery, the police shouldn't maybe be omnipresent, but they should at least be there.
But, in the end, it didn't matter. I knew who the killer was almost immediately - and it was from a single paragraph spoken by one of the characters (and I'm not saying who it was) and it was pretty obvious and also the reason for the murder.
However, one fact did change in the book, and it has to do with the reason for the murder and also indicates what was said, so please do not read it if you haven't read the book:
Other than that, I did like Catrina the cat, although Penny got on my nerves somewhat. She seemed slightly self-centered, and trust me, not all teenagers are self-centered; Penny was concerned with what Penny wanted, and didn't even ask how her mother was doing living by herself. She just didn't seem to care. Pamela needs to socialize more than she does; go to dinner out once in a while, go somewhere other than the co-op. When she's not investigating, she's a recluse. She's also emotionless. Did her emotions die when her husband did? Because she never seemed happy nor excited nor anything, really. Pamela is a pretty bland character.
All in all, while I knew who the killer was, it wasn't a bad book, and it had a decent plot. It just could have been so much better. I will read the next in the series in the hopes that it will improve.
https://www.amazon.com/Murder-She-Knit-Nibble-Mystery/dp/1496713273/ref
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2943880566
More on Peggy Ehrhart's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/e/peggy-ehrhart/
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