Katherine Hayton

A clever cozy mystery about an employee after working in the little book store for 20 yrs finds herself fired. She returns to the bookstore to fix a mistake and finds her employer dead. It is thought to be natural causes, but she is not so sure. A clever story of her sleuthing and interaction with the police woman in charge of the investigation. Amazon: A sudden death has Tash Mallory all stitched up! Tash Mallory's future is in the balance when her employer "Auntie Fran" fires her from the knitting shop job she's held for twenty years. Even worse, when Tash returns to confront her, she finds Fran's dead body in the back room. Luckily, the doctor soon concludes the death is from natural causes. A decision cast into doubt when Tash finds out she's inherited Fran's store and home. With an aggrieved nephew determined to fight the will in court and Fran's despondent fianc? pointing the finger of blame, Tash battles to clear her name. The police mightn't believe the death was murder, but the good folks of Patiti are quicker to rush to judgement. If Tash can't manoeuvre through the undercurrent of small town politics, winning the inheritance will be a Pyrrhic victory. Worse, the doctor's assessment might be wrong, leaving a killer on the loose.… (mer)

Overall, this was a rather twisted version of six degrees of separation theory but fell flat in a few places. The book focuses more on the mental state of the moms of the missing kids, and not on the horrors of the child abductions, and culprit. So it wasn't thriller paced, more hollow and going through the mindless nuances of life paced. There was very little time spent on culprit, or why the police never caught wind of his activities prior to the events in this book. Which was disappointing.

There is a present day plot line, then chapters featuring the backstory of one of the many main characters sprinkled throughout the book. This added to the lack of "thriller" within the book, because as soon as anything was getting heated you were thrown into someone's backstory.

While I was surprised at how everything linked together, there wasn't enough time spend on it all, and the end chapters were more a synopsis of how everyone went on living. So it ending rather bland for the story that was there. In the final twist, I saw it coming but the delivery and explanation was lackluster. Over all there were just a lot of things that were told in a narrator tone, instead of shown through the actions of the cast. I would have rather the final chapter been in the eyes of one of the ladies involved then the narrator telling us about the findings.

Aside from all of that, the interworking of parents trying to survive day to day life years after their children were abducted was fascinating. I am curious if the next book will pick up with any of these characters.

You'll love this book if you aren't looking for a fast paced thriller, or gore and on screen violence.

Note: Off Screen Abuse, Child Abduction, Alcoholism… (mer)