Author: J.C. Eaton
Genre: Mystery
Mass Market Paperback; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9781496724571
Kensington Publishing
336 Pages
$8.41; $7.99 Amazon
August 24, 2021
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Phee's marriage to Marshall Gregory promises to be the wedding of the year in Arizona's Sun City West -- that is, if you ask her mother Harriet. But before she can walk down the aisle, it looks like she has to solve one more murder. At a model train exhibit, Phee, Harriet, and her beloved Chiweenie, Streetman, discover the body of Sun City West's railroad club president, with an incriminating tap shoe near his lifeless corpse.
Wilbur Maines may have loved model trains but apparently he was not a model husband. There are rumors of affairs with hot-to-trot hobbyists the Choo-Choo Chicks. The police suspect his wife--and Harriet's friend -- Roxanne, who dances with the Rhythm Tappers, but Phee's mom is convinced they're on the wrong track. Before the poor woman is railroaded into spending the rest of her life behind bars, Phee, Harriet, and the book club ladies will need to do some fancy footwork, infiltrate the dance group, and find the real culprit before the killer leaves the station...
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Sophie "Phee" Kimball lives near Phoenix, Arizona and works as a bookkeeper for Williams Investigations. She's also engaged to one of the PIs, Marshall Gregory. Her mother Harriet lives in Sun City West and spends her free time nagging Phee and imagining murders are taking place all over the city...or she could be right...
Phee is trying to sleep when she receives an early morning phone call from her mother Harriet. Harriet insists she come to the model train building, because her friend Cecilia has found a body. Although Phee thinks it's not true, she finds out she's wrong. It certainly turns out to be a body -- the body of Sun City West's railroad club president, Wilbur Maines.
But when Wilbur's widow Roxanne is looking to be the guilty party by the police, Phee's not so sure. Neither is her employer, Nate Williams, nor Marshall. So now Phee's wedding plans are on hold while they search for the killer. Unfortunately, Phee is getting dragged into another of her mother's hare-brained ideas, and she needs to go along with it, even if just to keep her mother and her friends out of trouble. But that's not going to happen. Not if Harriet has anything to say about it...or her Chiweenie, Streetman...
This is the eighth book in the series and I have read them all. I have also loved how each one has gotten better than the last. I have no idea how they do it, but the authors seem to have found a golden key to making each book better. This one is all about model trains. I remember my brother had a Lionel train, and we would play with it quite a bit. (He probably still has it somewhere). To this day, I love watching the trains at Christmas, so it's memories for me.
But the memories for Wilbur Maines ended when he died. However, it seems he left memories with plenty of women, and now Phee doesn't know if a man or woman killed the man. All she knows is that every time she seems to get closer to a killer, it doesn't pan out. And with her bosses running around catching other leads, she's on her own (unless you count her mother, friends, and her Aunt Ina).
This book has quite a few funny moments, one involving Ina, which I wouldn't have expected, and another involving Streetman, which I would. And I love how the stories reflect on different characters in each book; this one involving Cecilia, the poor thing; who just doesn't understand how modern society works. It's quite interesting.
The mystery itself is intriguing, with the clues few and far between; but each thread leads back to another, and when the murderer is finally caught it comes as a complete surprise, although I did have a clue as to the reason why, and I was close in that, at least. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope that others will, too. Highly recommended.
More on J.C. Eaton's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/e/j-c-eaton/
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