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LOCKS AND CREAM CHEESE
by Rosemary and Larry Mild
PublishAmerica, December 2001
256 pages
$21.95
ISBN: 1588517020


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Newlyweds Rachel and Simon Mendelsohn travel to Rachel's childhood home in the small town of Black Rain Corners in Maryland to visit her father, psychoanalyst Avi Kepple. While they are there, Dr Avi has a dinner party for the newly assembled Historical Society board of directors of the Marche House Museum. Security must be discussed because a valuable painting has been stolen and the elderly caretaker had been found dead just days before.

Also living in the Kepple residence is Rachel's aunt and her middle-aged ne'er do well gambler son Victor Moskowitz. The housekeeper, Molly Mesta, takes care of everything at the house, her specialty being gourmet cooking and the serving up of unintentional humorous malapropos.

At the dinner, Victor leaves to use the phone and never returns. No one takes much notice since they are being fed great food along with generous portions of information about a fabulous gem-encrusted key, an important item of the Marche Museum. The woman who owned the key was said to have been killed in a carriage accident with her lover as they tried to escape her abusive husband 80 years ago. But her body was never recovered and the box that fit the key was lost.

When Victor's body is discovered the next morning in his room and the gem-encrusted key is found to have gone missing, Inspector Paco LeSoto, a retired detective now working part-time in Black Rain Corners is called on to investigate. Was Victor murdered and did his gambling debt have anything to do with the missing key?

LOCKS & CREAM CHEESE is a lovely but slightly unusual cozy. It has no single lead character, so we don't get to follow one main sleuth as our companion from the first page. Instead, the book proceeds in each person's point of view until the next character comes along. The mystery and its solution pretty much comes to a conclusion through the insight of almost everyone of its large cast of characters.

A thing I found confusing about this book is that though many of the characters have Jewish names and they sprinkle their sentences with Yiddish phrases, nothing else about their lives is related to their religion. Matzo ball soup is served next to crab dip and ham with no mention of kosher eating and there's no evidence that they followed the rules for a Jewish funeral dealing with Victor's demise. If they don't act the part then why make the characters so specifically from one section of the population? I kept thinking that it was some sort of clue and I was waiting for an explanation to be revealed but none ever came.

Even so, this is a satisfying read with a fine premise and a well thought-out conclusion. A historical background story fits into the mystery in a fascinating way. All in all, by the end of the book you're sorry to see the finish, which makes you very ready to read the next in the series. It's just what every cozy reader wants!

Reviewed by Sharon Katz, June 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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