Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781617739293
Kensington Mystery
316 Pages
$7.99; $6.89 Amazon
March 28, 2017
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Before she started hosting dinners for Indiana University's Sociology Department at Pans 'N Pancakes, Robbie never imagined scholarly meetings could be so hostile. It's all due to Professor Charles Stilton, who seems to thrive on heated exchanges with his peers and underlings, and tensions flare one night after he disrespects Robbie's friend, graduate student Lou. So when Robbie and Lou go snowshoeing the next morning and find the contentious academic frozen under ice, police suspect Lou might have killed him after their public tiff. To prove her friend's innocence, Robbie is absorbing local gossip about Professor Stilton's past and developing her own thesis on the homicide - even if that means stirring up terrible danger for herself along the way...
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Robbie Jordan owns Pans 'N Pancakes, a restaurant that serves breakfast and lunch in a small town in Indiana. There's a group of university people who are holding a meeting there, and she can't help but hear snippets of conversation. Some are downright hostile -- and they're coming from Professor Charles Stilton, who's goading people. She hears him get into an altercation with her friend Lou Perlman, wherein Lou accuses him of stealing her research. Then later, she only manages to catch the tail end of an argument with the chair, Zenobia (Zen) Brown. All she knows is that she's grateful she doesn't have to deal with him.
The next day, while she and Lou are snowshoeing, they go across the ice and Robbie sees something under it -- which turns out to be the frozen body of the professor. After calling the police and being questioned, she discovers that her friend is one of the suspects. To make things more complicated, she's renovating her upstairs so that she can open a bed and breakfast in the future. She finds small items in the walls, and mentions it to the previous owner who tells her she would like to see them. But she also finds something else -- something she was never supposed to find, and it makes her curious why it was there and who used it. Now, she has two mysteries to solve: who killed the professor, and who wants her out of the investigation...permanently?
I read the first two in this series and I enjoyed them, so (quite a bit later) decided to go back and read the others. This is the third in the series, and I will say that I enjoyed it as much as the first two. Robbie is an interesting character: she's the owner of a restaurant and a cook, and is also capable of renovating a building. She's also a whiz at crossword puzzles, and right now the puzzle she has in front of her has her wondering. So far, she's narrowed it down to four suspects, but which one of them are guilty?
While she's not going around interrogating people, she does ask questions, and it definitely is making the murderer nervous. There are small clues, but they're not obvious, and this is a mystery that makes you think while you're searching for a killer along with Robbie. When the ending comes and the murderer is revealed, it's a bit of a different climax, and one that I enjoyed reading. That said, I will continue on with this series. Recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/When-Grits-Country-Store-Mystery/dp/1617739294/ref
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1927588930
More on Maddie Day's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/maddie-day/
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