mystery

amateur sleuth mystery 

2010: #35 – Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie)

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Agatha Christie’s genius for detective fiction is unparalleled. Her worldwide popularity is phenomenal, her characters engaging, her plots spellbinding. No one knows the human heart–or the dark passions that can stop it–better than Agatha Christie. She is truly the one and only Queen of Crime.

Miss Marple–Agatha Christie’s immortal spinster sleuth with the razor-sharp mind and an intuitive understanding of criminal behavior–encounters a compelling murder mystery in the sleepy little village of St. Mary Mead, where under the seemingly peaceful exterior of an English country village lurks intrigue, guilt, deception and death.

Colonel Protheroe, local magistrate and overbearing land-owner is the most detested man in the village. Everyone–even in the vicar–wishes he were dead. And very soon he is–shot in the head in the vicar’s own study. Faced with a surfeit of suspects, only the inscrutable Miss Marple can unravel the tangled web of clues that will lead to the unmasking of the killer.

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cozy mystery 

2010: #27 – Rest in Pieces (Rita Mae Brown)

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Mrs. Murphy thinks the new man in town is the cat’s meow…. Maybe she should think again. Small towns don’t take kindly to strangers–unless the stranger happens to be a drop-dead gorgeous and seemingly unattached male. When Blair Bainbridge comes to Crozet, Virginia, the local matchmakers lose no time in declaring him perfect for their newly divorced postmistress, Marry Minor “Harry Haristeen.” Even Harry’s tiger cat, Ms. Murphy, and her Welsh Corgi, Tee Tucker, believe he smells A-okay. Could his one little imperfection be that he’s a killer? Blair becomes the most likely suspect when the pieces of a dismembered corpse begin turning up around Crozet. No one knows who the dead man is, but when a grisly clue makes a spectacular appearance in the middle of the fall festivities, more than an early winter snow begins chilling the blood of Crozet’s very best people. That’s when Ms. Murphy, her friend Tucker, and her human companion Harry begin to sort throughout the clues . . . only to find themselves a whisker away from becoming the killer’s next victims.

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