Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Trade Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781496721587; 9781496718341
Kensington Publishing
496 Pages
$7.99; $9.99; $7.59 Amazon
August 28, 2018
⭐⭐⭐
Trick or Treat Murder
While Lucy Stone is whipping up orange-frosted cupcakes for her town's annual Halloween festival, an arsonist is on the loose in Tinker's Cove. When arson turns into murder, a little digging in all the wrong places puts Lucy too close to a shocking discover that could send all her best-laid plans up in smoke...
Wicked Witch Murder
Not everyone in Tinker's Cove is enchanted with newcomer Diana Ravenscroft and her quaint little shop offering everything from jewelry to psychic readings. But a gruesome murder of Diana's friend has Lucy Stone uncovering a deadly web of secrets - and a spine-chilling brush with the things that go bump in the night...
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This is a compilation of two of two Lucy Stone Mysteries: Trick or Treat Murder and Wicked Witch Murder. If you've read the Lucy Stone Mysteries, then these will fall right in line.
In the first mystery, Lucy is still a youngish mother with her four children; Zoe is a newborn baby, so the other children are still young. When there's a house fire at a home that Lucy's husband Bill restored that belonged to a client, Lucy is sad. But not as sad as when Lucy and Bill discover that someone they knew and cared about was in the home and died there. While it at first appears to be an accident because of the home's age, it soon becomes apparent that it was arson when other old buildings are being set aflame. And when Lucy starts getting closer to discovering who's doing the nasty deed, she unknowingly puts herself in danger and just might not survive...
In the second book Lucy goes to see a witch with her friends for a group reading. When what the woman tells her starts to come true, Lucy, a skeptic, still doesn't want to believe it. Not even when she comes across a burned body in the woods that leaves her shaken. She gets to the point that she forbids the woman from encouraging her sixteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Then a local woman dies, and the stakes are raised. If Lucy isn't careful, hers might be the next body to be found...
I read this dual mystery book because I love to "read the season," as it were, and these take place at Halloween. I have to say that I enjoyed the first mystery; the second, not so much. It seemed to me that in the first, the writing was crisp and had a flair to it; but in the second, it all seemed so tired, almost as if it had aged along with Lucy. Unfortunately, I found this to be so in another Halloween mystery she wrote later than these two.
But the storyline in the first was interesting to me and the characters involved kept me wondering which one of them was an arsonist. There were plenty of people to choose from, and several of them could have been the guilty party. When the murderer was discovered, it came as rather a surprise, which was indeed a good thing. I did like the ending immensely as everything came together nicely.
In the second book I was bored almost from the beginning. I found the character of Diana completely unlikable, and if you don't like a character that's quite a major one in the book, you probably won't enjoy it, and that was the problem for me. Because of her, I couldn't wait for the book to end and really didn't care 'whodunit.' So this book was a no-go for me, and the reason I only gave the entire thing three stars.
So, in the end, this two-book novel is worth reading if you're a Lucy Stone fan or if you've never read the series before; but you can draw your own conclusions to them both.
https://www.amazon.com/Halloween-Murder-Lucy-Stone-Mystery/dp/1496721586/ref
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3625535598
More on Leslie Meier's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/leslie-meier/
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