Book Review: For Duck’s Sake by Donna Andrews (Meg Langslow #37)

Stars: 3 out of 5 

Pros: Characters are fun and charming

Cons: The plot needed a little more focus

The Bottom Line:

Digging up some bones

While preparing for parade

Needed more focus

Meg Is a Little Unfocused in Her Latest Case

If a series goes on long enough, eventually it puts out a book or two that isn’t up to its usual standards. For me, For Duck’s Sake, the 37th in Donna Andrews’s Meg Langslow series, is one of those. It’s not a bad book, but I was expecting better. 

For those who have missed this series, Meg often gets roped into helping with large projects put on by friends or her extended family, and she often finds herself involved in a murder along the way. Over the course of the series, we’ve met quite an assortment of characters who pop in and out of the series as needed. While the character’s lives have changed, you really can pop into this series just about anywhere and follow along, and the characters do live in a world all their own where time is irrelevant and age is flexible. Realistic? No. But for this series, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s light, and reality would take me out of the world that Donna has created and I love to visit. 

This book finds Meg and company in the beginning of June. Her sister-in-law is putting in a duck pond at the house she and Meg’s brother have just bought down the road from Meg. However, the digging has hardly started when the backhoe uncovers a skeleton. It’s quickly obvious that the remains belong to someone who was murdered. Who was he and how did he come to be buried there?

Meanwhile, Meg’s house has become the staging area for the first annual Mutt March, the brainchild of the town’s vet. It’s designed to show off dogs available for adoption from multiple shelters. Will the parade go off without a hitch? Or will someone try to sabotage it?

As you can see, we got dueling storylines. And, honestly, that’s one of the issues. The Mutt March could have been a fun B storyline, but it took too much time for that. The attempts to bring some plot to the proceedings were underdeveloped. 

We quickly determine that the skeleton is most likely decades old, so Meg spends some time investigating just who it might be. This brings up some storylines from earlier in the series I haven’t thought about for years, and I enjoyed that trip back to earlier times. Even so, the pacing as a little off here, mainly thanks to the time spent on the Mutt March. I’d guessed what was going on a little early, but I still found the ending a little abrupt. 

The saving grace here are the characters. They are charming as always, and I love getting to spend some time with them. As I said earlier, there are so many of them that we only get to spend a little time with some of them, but I still enjoy it. And we meet some interesting new characters, too. 

Meg narrates the story in a breezy manner that helps pull me in. I love the humor we get from her observations as well as the characters’ antics. It might not be as funny as some of the earlier books, but I’m still smiling the entire time I’m reading, and there are some good laughs. 

I’m looking forward to this year’s Christmas novel. For Duck’s Sake isn’t the best book for those new to the series to jump in with, but fans will still be glad they picked it up. 

Enjoy more of the Meg Langslow series.