OLD-FASHIONED HOLIDAY HOMICIDE by Gin Jones
Fiction, Cozy Mystery
5*****
Blurb: Jess Walker is spending Christmas with her sisters for the first time in years, but it’s a working holiday at the Three Sisters B&B in the heart of Kentucky’s bourbon country. Jess, Em, and CJ are expecting a guest who has long dreamed of running her own B&B, so she’ll be playing hostess while her extended family will join her as additional guests. Except the sisters end up doing most of the hard work, and things keep going awry. Jess would swear the holiday is jinxed. And things go from difficult to downright dangerous, when CJ delivers her bourbon cranberry sauce to the local gift shop…and finds the owner dead! The sheriff immediately jumps to the wrong conclusions, and the sisters are determined to get justice for CJ’s best wholesale customer. Suspects are scarce though, and the B&B’s guests are spooked by the murder and threatening to cancel their booking. Can the sisters solve the murder while still giving their guests an Old-Fashioned Holiday?
Thoughts: I enjoyed this mystery – though I will admit, I knew who the perp was pretty early. But that didn’t reduce my enjoyment. After all, I wanted to see the reasons behind the murder.
In this story, an older woman who owns a tea shop/tourist gift shop and rents out office space in her building is killed. But who would kill such a nice woman? She was everyone’s friend. Right?
Jess Walker, a lawyer who rents one of the offices in the building, and who has moved back to her hometown after twenty years to help her sisters run a B&B, goes on the hunt with her sisters and their various boyfriends. After all, they can’t count on the incompetent sheriff to do it right, so it’s up to them. I liked Jess and Em and Cy. They’re realistic. And have squabbles like real sisters and lots of love. They’re tasked with providing a “Hallmark” kind of holiday experience for their guests. Gerrie wants to learn what it’s like to run a B&B – and she gets her money’s worth with the sisters. But there are a lot of things the travel agent didn’t tell them about – like tours of businesses that are closed, and special meals (to be ordered from caterers and delivered) and decorating when there are no decorations. It’s all a bit chaotic, especially when they’re also trying to solve a murder. There are lots of unexpected slip ups in both the holiday arrangements and in the murder investigation. Enough to keep everyone on their toes trying to solve all the problems.
Recommended. And I know I’ll be reading more by this author.
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