Book Review: In Sunshine or in Shadow by Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles (Molly Murphy #20)

Stars: 5 out of 5

Pros: Strong mystery and characters

Cons: All cons hidden in shadow

The Bottom Line:

Catskills mystery

With a murder in the woods

Strong number twenty

Not So Restful Time in the Catskills

I was a bit surprised when I saw that In Sunshine or in Shadow is the twentieth Molly Murphy Mystery.  It makes sense when I stop and think about how long I’ve been reading about the cases this Irish immigrant solves.  But twenty books is quite the milestone.  And it is a milestone that fans of the series will enjoy.

If you haven’t met Molly yet, we first journeyed with her to New York City in 1901 as she immigrated to the US, feeling a bad situation in Ireland.  Over the books, we’ve watched her make friends, get married, and have a child.  Now, it is the summer of 1908, and she is expecting her second child.  Since the typhoid outbreak in the city is worse than normal and unpredictable, she reluctantly heads to Westchester where her mother-in-law lives out in the country.

After she’s been there long enough to begin to get bored, she decides to go visit her friends Sid and Gus who went further from the city into the Catskills.  They’ve reluctantly gone to visit Sid’s family who own some land out there.  But the reunion is dampened by murder.  With the police not willing to let anyone leave until they’ve caught the killer, Molly knows she needs to get to the bottom of what actually happened.  Can she do it?

The authors do a good job of getting Molly and the other characters to the new location fairly quickly and then they spend some time introducing us to the victim and suspects before the murder happens.  The result is a book where the body might drop a little later than normal for the books I read, but I didn’t feel like any of the time was wasted.

Once the murder does take place, we are off and running with plenty of suspects to keep Molly guessing and us engaged.  The book does weave in multiple directions before we hit the logical solution.  And what a great climax!

This is set just as the Catskills was beginning to become a summer resort area.  While I grew up on the west coast and wasn’t familiar with that era or local history, I still found it interesting to watch people try to get in at the very beginning.

Meanwhile, prejudice plays a part in the book.  Many of the characters are Jewish.  It makes me sad to see how they were treated by a few of the characters.  Fortunately, it isn’t all of them, which makes me happy.  Molly’s reactions make it clear how she feels about it without any need to lecture us, too, which was great.

Molly, Sid, and Gus are the only series regulars who get serious page time, but that’s not an issue for me.  They are the core of the series, and I love getting to spend time with them.  That also allows us to really get to know the suspects, which was great.  Daniel, Molly’s husband, manages to be pretty great when he is on the page, which I enjoyed.  He can be a great character when he lets himself be one.

As I said, fans will be rewarded with In Sunshine or in Shadow.  If you haven’t started this series yet, you are in for a treat with these trips back in time.

Enjoy the rest of the Molly Murphy books.

NOTE: I received an ARC of this book.