Handy Hidey-Hole Hides Homicide
After enjoying Daisy Bateman’s debut mystery, I’ve been anxiously waiting to return to her world to find out what happens next to Claudia Simcoe, her protagonist. That wait is over with A Dismal Harvest, and the wait was well worth it.
Claudia owns a large marketplace in the town of San Elmo along the California coast. Normally, her tenants use it to sell gourmet, locally grown and made foods, but tonight, it’s the site for a library fundraiser. Everything is going well until the volunteers start cleaning up and one of them discovers that someone opened a secret compartment in the wall at some point in the evening.
Claudia is quite surprised, mainly because she didn’t know that compartment was there. She quickly figures out that the compartment was opened by Clark Gowan, a local lawyer. In fact, Gowan was involved in helping when Claudia bought the marketplace. The next morning, she goes to confront him about taking something from her building, but she arrives at his office to find him dead. Even though the police don’t consider Claudia a suspect, she wants to know what was hidden in her building. Then a friend comes under suspicion. Can Claudia solve this mystery?
This book jumps right in with the mystery, and it does a wonderful job of keeping us engaged the entire time. We got plenty of puzzle pieces, but it was hard to determine how they all fit together until the end. Once Claudia figured it out, it all made perfect sense to me.
Claudia’s marketplace has multiple tenants, and I must confession I couldn’t keep them all straight as I was reading. However, since they are supporting players, it really isn’t an issue. The characters important to the story are sharp and developed enough to make us care about them and the outcome.
And I love Claudia. She has a habit of second guessing herself after she’s said something, a habit I could related to all too well. I also appreciated her sense of humor, which comes through not only in her dialogue but in the limited third person narration. I was smiling if not laughing the entire way through.
As I said in my review of the first book, I feel a special connection to this series. San Elmo is a fictitious town, but I am familiar with the area where it is set on the Sonoma County coast since I grew up near that part of California. I could easily picture the area as Claudia was investigating.
If you enjoyed the first book, you’ll be glad you picked up A Dismal Harvest. And if you haven’t started this series yet, you should do that today.
NOTE: I received a copy of this book.
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