*I received a free ARC of Furbidden Fatality in exchange for my review. All opinions are my own.*
Last spring and summer when everyone else was baking bread and comparing sourdough starters under a stay-at-home order, I was bingeing BritBox. There are 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, and I watched them all.
But my gateway drug to BritBox was ITV's Agatha Christie's Marple (filmed in the 2000s and starring Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie) which then sent me backtracking to the BBC's Miss Marple series from the 1980s that starred Joan Hickson.
I do love me a good British murder mystery. (See my much earlier review of Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King as evidence.)
And while the cozy mystery at hand, Furbidden Fatality by Deborah Blake, is set in the New York Catskills instead of Great Britain, the main character, Kari Stuart (we shall forgive her for misspelling the world's best name) is compared to Miss Marple more than once throughout the story. While Kari is noticeably younger and significantly less interested in knitting than Miss Marple, she does manage to discover a dead body and solve the murder before the local police. She also works with one of her former teachers who has Miss Marple's long memory for the residents of the local community and who offers character insight by comparing the characters under suspicion to people she knew long ago.
(I always wondered how Miss Marple's tiny village of St. Mary Mead could fit so many shady characters and still be a tiny village, but I digress.)
When the book begins, Kari is at a crossroads. She's recently won $5 million on a lottery ticket, and she's trying to decide what to do with her winnings and her life. Before she can come to any conclusions, she discovers a black kitten near her apartment and tries to to find an animal shelter to take in the stray cat. Her efforts to find a home for the kitten actually lead to Kari finding her own new home and, maybe, her vocation, when she impulsively buys a failing animal sanctuary and its nearby rundown farmhouse.
The animal sanctuary has a couple of strikes against it. One of its resident pit bulls has been accused of escaping his kennel and biting someone, and the local dog warden seems determined to shut the sanctuary down.
The situation only gets worse when Kari discovers a dead body in the fenced-in dog run.
Kari must work to try and save the pittie from being euthanized, save the sanctuary from a cease-and-desist order, and save herself from suspicion of murder. Happily she has good staff at the sanctuary, good friends in town, and a new black kitten with an eye (or paw, perhaps) for finding clues.
This is a fun and entertaining read that is exactly like what cozy mysteries are supposed to be--an amateur sleuth trying to unravel a conundrum without direct police access and absent a lot of gore. I am SO glad I read it. Cozy mysteries (like the books of Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Donna Andrews, and Diane Mott Davidson) should not be confused with police procedurals or crime dramas (like the books of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs).
And after the year we've had, I think everyone should cuddle up with a cozy mystery. You've earned some entertainment that challenges the mind and provides characters to root for without making your heart ache.
This is also a great book for animal lovers. I'm not personally a fan of animal stories per se. Please keep your Call of the Wild and Black Beauty far from me. But . . . I do love Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow books which always feature a variety animals. And, at one point, I had read most of the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries where the main character, Mrs. Murphy, is a cat. So Kari's new kitten, Queenie, fits in a long tradition of clever animals in cozy mysteries, and if your heart warms at the idea of a heroine who is saving animals while she's saving herself, this is a must-read for you.
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