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AT WICK'S END
by Tim Myers
Berkley Prime Crime, February 2004
192 pages
$5.99
ISBN: 0425194604


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I love candles. I have candles for Halloween, for Christmas, for spring. I have candles that smell like vanilla and some that smell like pine. You get the picture. I have always thought that the candle fairy dropped off a supply at my local shop. I had no idea how complex and difficult the process is until I read AT WICK'S END by Tim Myers, a novel set in a candle store in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina.

The book opens with a not very believable act, one of dazzling stupidity. Belle Black invites someone she knows to be a murderer to her shop. She is alone and has told no one of her plans to confront the murderer, believing that the meeting will lead to a confession -- first to her and then to the police. Not surprisingly, that doesn't happen. She is murdered.

Harrison Black is saved from a life selling second-hand computers by a bequest from his great aunt Belle Black, who wills him her candle store and River's Edge, the building in which it is housed. Learning the art of candle-making from scratch, Harrison is burdened by Belle's assistant, Eve, who thought that she should have been willed the shop, and by lease agreements Belle made with the tenants in the building that have left Harrison virtually impoverished. To roil the pot still further, Harrison realizes that his aunt's death was not an accident.

As readers of Myer's "lighthouse" series know, he is skillful at plotting and just as adept at creating characters. None of the characters is particularly weird or evil. Eve turns from her original hostility to becoming Harrison's mentor; the wealthy Mrs. Jorgensen turns from haughty and demanding to becoming a booster of the store.

The only less than convivial characters are Becca, Harrison's former girlfriend, who desperately wants him back; the inscrutable tenant Munch, who rarely leaves his apartment; and another tenant, the lawyer Lucas Young, who offers to buy out Harrison at ten times the building's worth. If Harrison sells, he violates his aunt's dictum that he keep both the shop and the building for five years.

Harrison begins as something of a bumbler but gains confidence as the book progresses, and he tenaciously investigates his great aunt's death while he is learning and enjoying his new craft.

Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, May 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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