Wherever zucchini grow, they grow with unstoppable vigor. Patricia Schuster and her mother face a legendary overabundance in The Zucchini Fairy Murder, Book Two in the Salty Sister Mystery series by Ann Philipp, but garden veggies are soon to be only a close second of their problems.
They have more zucchini than any family, friends, neighbors, and possibly the entire population of the surrounding several counties could possibly go through in a season, no matter how much zucchini bread they make. Mrs. Schuster, in an absolute riot of an opening scene, cruises through their California hometown in the middle of the night looking for cars with open windows to drop bags of zucchini into.
This camouflaged, highly questionable type raid on the neighborhood distresses her daughter, who tries without success to discourage her mother from her nighttime activities. Such hilarity threads through the background action of the story, as Patricia does her best to calm her mother down, rein her in, and manage her crazy.
Plot and humor merge when petty zucchini crime clashes with a murder investigation.
The mystery kicks into high gear as Patricia can’t resist trying to solve the case with the help of a group of golden-age ladies she inherited along with her grandmother’s house and antiques business. With nerves of steel, these formerly incarcerated elderly ladies now work for the FBI and are highly skilled in specialized areas like technology, firearms, languages, and psychology, and they have no problem breaking the law to solve a case.
After Patricia’s first ‘case’, detailed in book one of the Salty Sister Mystery series, Grand Theft Death, Patricia and ‘the Ladies’ have got a way of getting to the heart of an investigation. Even when that way involves a bit of subterfuge, a lot of illicit snooping, and more than a few sets of lockpicks.
In the best cozy mystery tradition, what makes The Zucchini Fairy Murder so much fun—besides the overabundance of summer squash—is the combination of spilling gossip about the small-town residents and their misdeeds with the one step forward, two steps back approach of an amateur sleuth.
Along with humor and intrigue, this story builds eclectic but earnest bonds between its central women.
We see sisterhood, motherhood, and cool aunt relationships between Patricia, her mother, and the four ‘Ladies’ of her grandmother’s generation who have taken both women under their wings. That web of relationships is sometimes nurturing, especially on the mornings when the Ladies make Patricia an excellent breakfast.
The Zucchini Fairy Murder by Ann Philipp is a zany romp where an amateur sleuth tries to figure out whodunit in spite of both herself, and the ladies who bring their specialized skills to the case.
This is the sort of cozy small town setting more than a bit outside the modern problems of everyday life. A perfect read to leave the ordinary and go to a place where a little dash of luck and the lead to a happy outcome for everyone in spite of many false accusations, mistaken arrests, and midnight zucchini drops from an unseen “fairy” along the way.
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