Daily Archives: February 25, 2020

This series has quickly become one of my favorites. It is crazy funny with lots of characters who hi-jinks are outrageous. Each book is better than the last and since they are all great, that is saying something.

In this story, Val (the owner of Pie Town) has allowed one of her employees the use of Pie Town after hours for a poetry slam. There are a number of poets present, including Professor Starke. After the event, the professor is found murdered just a few steps away from the bakery.

Val and her fantastic pie crust specialist and landlord, Charlene are on the case. They are the Baker Street Bakers and usually solve much smaller crimes. However, when a murder threatens Pie Town, they gear up for the case.

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This is the ninth book in the Maggie Hope mystery series. In this story, Maggie has turned her life upside down. Because of her spying efforts in the War, and because of her near miss at being one of a serial killers victims, she has turned to something other than fighting the war.

She is still doing her part by diffusing unexploded bombs that litter the landscape in London. It is a hard job and one that is generally filled by conscientious objectors. A number of these are the British citizens of Italian descent. Rather than fight their families in the war, they turn to other ways of helping.

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It’s the holiday season in Sun City West, the retirement community where most of the action in this series takes place. It starts with Halloween, moves rapidly to Thanksgiving and finishes off with Christmas.

What better way to celebrate the season than dressing up your dog to be a contestant in the Precious Pooches Holiday Extravaganza costume contest? At least, that is what Sophie Kimball (know to most as Phee) finds that is her mother’s way of celebrating the holidays.

Streeman, the dog in question, throws everything for a loop when he finds a dead body in the backyard of the house just behind his owner’s. Phee is brought in to investigate even though she is just an accountant at a private detective agency. That doesn’t make a bit of difference to her mother who insists Phee must have some investigative skills that rubbed off in the course of her work.

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This is a series that I started mid-way through and had no problems picking it up. I did go back and read a couple of the first books as well. Having said all of that, I believe that this book is more transitional and it would be helpful to read some of the earlier books first. You can read it stand-alone but some of the nuances of the relationships might be better understood with a background of the storyline.

Mattie is medicolegal death investigator (medical examiner) who assists the forensic pathologist in figuring out cause of death. In her case, she is also responsible for assisting the police with forensic evidence found at the scene if a crime has been committed.

Mattie teams up often with her husband, Steve, who is a homicide detective. In this story, she doesn’t work with him as much as previous books. She is more or less out there on her own and it proves to be a serious issue.

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