About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

LYE IN WAIT
by Cricket McRae
Midnight Ink, October 2007
324 pages
$12.95
ISBN: 0738711160


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Cricket McRae kicks off her new crafting series by making great use of an urban legend and the uniqueness of her setting. Her heroine, Sophie Mae Reynolds, supports herself and her daughter via a home-based soap-making business. The book begins when Sophie comes down to the workroom and finds her handyman dead on the floor, having drunk lye.

The person who drinks lye by accident is a combination old wives’ tale and cautionary story among soap-makers; it’s not hard to run into it, although McRae gets double points from me for both using it and pointing out all the ways in which it is unrealistic. But only a soap-maker knows how unlikely it is that someone will actually drink lye; the police are more interested in knowing why Sophie has so much of the stuff and how Walter died so close to her stash. Eventually they chalk it up to a suicide and seem to lose interest.

But Sophie can’t let it go. She’s appalled how little she knew Walter, who lived so close to her house and had been so fond of her daughter. The more she finds, the more she’s confused. Walter had friends, money, and plans for his future – he’d be the last person who would kill himself, and so gruesomely.

Even more suspiciously, Walter’s house is broken into (once by Sophie, in one of her less intelligent moves) and then burns down. Convinced that someone is covering something up, unable to get anywhere with the police, Sophie starts investigating on her own.

As impressed as I was when McRae was realistic about crafting supplies, I was even more impressed when Sophie ran into all the sorts of realistic problems a self-appointed busybody ought to run into – people she upsets needlessly, people who refuse to talk, and official people who point out that she’s simultaneously making herself a target and a suspect. As fond as I am of cozies, book after book of people deputizing themselves and just tripping over clues gets annoying very quickly. Sophie is given a reason for her inability to stop meddling (and it’s not just the obvious one) and she runs into roadblocks. I appreciated that.

Still, the puzzle never strays too far from the relatively obvious, which is a drawback; around halfway through it becomes predictable and at two-thirds through it becomes very predictable. So LYE IN WAIT gets a mixed reaction – it’s a solid, decent start to a new series with some advantages and some disadvantages. It’s the sort I class as a rainy-afternoon time-killer.

My advance copy does not include the promised beauty product recipes, although I get an impression from the text of what they are and how well they’ll be written. Their presence in the final book should tip the balance in favor of getting LYE IN WAIT if you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at making your own spa supplies.

Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, September 2007

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]