Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | MYSTERY PAG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | MYSTERY PAG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | MYSTERY PAG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | MYSTERY PAG | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"The twenty-five mysteries that Katherine Hall Page has cooked up for her sleuth, Faith Fairchild, make for delectable reading. What a body of work! Dig in."
-- Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
Amateur detective and caterer Faith Fairchild is at her Penobscot Bay, Maine cottage preparing for a summer wedding, when she stumbles across . . . another body in this 25th entry in the beloved mystery series.
For the first time in years, Faith Fairchild has time for herself. Her husband Tom is spending days on the other side of the island using a friend's enhanced WiFi for a project; their son, Ben, after his first year in college, is studying abroad for the summer; and their daughter Amy is working at the old Laughing Gulls Lodge, now a revamped conference center.
Faith is looking forward to some projects of her own. Her friend Sophie Maxwell is also spending the summer on Sanpere Island, hoping for distractions from her worries that she isn't yet pregnant. And the daughter of Faith's good friend Pix Miller is getting married to a wonderful guy . . . with a less-than-wonderful mother. Between keeping Sophie's spirits up and Pix's blood pressure down, Faith has her hands full.
And that's before a body with a mysterious tattoo and connections far away from small Sanpere Island appears in the Lily Pond. Once again, Faith will get to the bottom of this strange case--and whip up a delicious blueberry buckle on the side.
Author Notes
Katherine Hall Page was born in New Jersey in 1947. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Wellesley College, a master's degree in Secondary Education from Tufts University and a Doctorate in Administration, Public Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard University. Before becoming a full-time writer, she taught in high school for many years. She is the author of the Faith Fairchild Mystery series. She has won numerous awards including the 1991 Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel for The Body in the Belfry, the 2006 Agatha Award for Best Mystery Novel for The Body in the Snowdrift, and the 2001 Agatha Award for Best Short Story for The Would-Be Widower.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Agatha winner Page's tantalizing 25th Faith Fairchild mystery (after 2017's The Body in the Casket), plans for a relaxing summer on Maine's Sanpere Island quickly go awry when caterer Faith and friend Sophie Maxwell find the body of an unknown man with an unusual tattoo floating in a pond. The death is only the beginning of trouble for the usually peaceful community. Also disrupting the peace are Pix and Sam Miller's new neighbors from hell, the Cranes, who are unlawfully cutting down trees on their property with loud chainsaws. Meanwhile, Pix and Sam have an uninvited guest, Alexandra Kohn, a high society snob and their daughter's future mother-in-law. Sophie's mother, Babs Harrington, one of society's grande dames, deals with the imperious Alexandra, while the Millers battle it out with the Cranes. The discovery of another body raises the stakes, and Faith once again turns amateur sleuth. This long-running traditional mystery series is still as fresh as a cool pitcher of Faith's strawberry shrub. Agent: Faith Hamlin, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Vacationing in Maine has been a Fairchild family tradition through Faith and Tom's entire married life, but this year offers a special treat: with Tom on sabbatical from the church to work on a novel, the family will be able to spend an entire summer on Sanpere Island until a mix of murder and wedding bells disrupt the normally serene calm of Penobscot Bay. Trouble arrives when Faith finds a dead body at the bottom of the local swimming pond, and then another body turns up, seemingly caught in a lobster trap. Meanwhile, Faith has her hands full helping her friend Pix Miller plan her upcoming nuptials while dealing with her in-law issues. Will Faith, the amateur sleuth, solve the murders while keeping the wedding on track? Fans of the long-running series will enjoy this twenty-fifth installment, which is filled, as usual, with tasty recipes.--Shoshana Frank Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DOES ANYONE write creepier villains than Jo Nesbo? Wait a minute, I'm thinking. Still thinking. O.K., the answer is: No, I can't think of anyone who makes my skin crawl like Nesbo. In KNIFE (Knopf, 4SI pp., $27.95), translated from the Norwegian by Ned Smith, a sexual predator named Svein Finne is at large in Oslo. "Finne's driving force is to spread his seed and father children," we learn. "It's his way of gaining eternal life." If he fails to impregnate his victims, he casually kills them. If any of the women should have an abortion, he punishes them in vile ways. And if any of them should bring a child to term, "the Fiance," as he's known, appears in the delivery room to "assist" in the birth. While Finne's intervention at the hospital is disturbing, it provides this weirdo with an ironclad alibi for the killings being investigated by Harry Hole, the rogue police detective in Nesbo's bleak noir series. Harry is at a low point in his unstable life. He's drinking much of the time - to the point of sucking up the last drop of whiskey from a filthy floor - and when his wife leaves him, this time for good, he completely falls apart. But this is what readers expect of Harry, whose weaknesses somehow contribute to his manly appeal. And whenever he does fall flat, there always seems to be a good woman around to pick him up. "He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot and he had a liver-colored scar running across one side of his face," according to one such woman, upon meeting him for the first time. "But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softened it, something that made it almost handsome." In an unexpected move, Nesbo resolves the business of the psycho flaneé rather early in the story, which necessitates the introduction of another slippery killer, as well as a chilling flashback to a military mission in Afghanistan. There's an explicit description of that reliable old method of execution, "drawing and quartering," if that's your thing, plus many other throwaway delights, including a list of the eight categories of killers, of which No. 8 is "just plain bad and angry." They play great music in Ace Atkins's down-home mystery, THE SHAMELESS (Putnam, 446 pp., $27). Fine country tunes like Waylon Jennings's "Rainy Day Woman" ("Woke up this mornin' to the sunshine / It sure as hell looks just like rain"). They also throw superior shindigs, like the annual Good Ole Boy, "a big gathering of every swindler, huckster and elected official in north Mississippi." They're just a little sloppy about observing the laws of the land. A long time ago, the sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., ruled Brandon Taylor's death a suicide; but 20 years later, two Brooklynites hope to prove otherwise on their true-crime podcast. The two reporters are bland white bread compared with the hell-raising locals they encounter down South - folks like Old Man Skinner, who thinks it's a fine idea to build a 60-foot cross on the highway, and Fannie Hathcock, whose brothel sign would be hidden by the cross. There's a plot in here somewhere, but it doesn't intrude on the real fun, like catching up with the boys in the barbershop watching "Days of Our Lives." If you think of cozy mysteries as palate cleansers, the body in the WAKE (Morrow/HarperCollins, 219 pp., $25.95) is your kind of book. Katherine Hall Page's latest Faith Fairchild mystery (the 25 th in a long-running series) sends her beloved amateur sleuth on a rare solo vacation to the family's summer cottage in Maine. Her minister husband, Tom, is fine, as are their two grown children, so series fans need not worry. Faith, a professional caterer, plans to relax and help a bit in the kitchen of a friend whose daughter is getting married. (There's a recipe for old-fashioned blueberry buckle at the back of the book that seems easy to make and sounds delicious - except you really need wild Maine blueberries, which are hellish to gather.) Given her sleuthing history, it's not surprising that Faith's detective skills are called on when a body with goth tattoos is found floating in the lily pond. Murder, if murder it is, is a grave business, but the next-door neighbors are committing a more serious crime by cutting down the old-growth pines on their property, which had provided much-needed privacy. In the country, some people would happily fight to the death over such an offense. The question is: Will Faith find the villain in time to save the wedding? DAVID GORDON'S sequel to "The Bouncer," THE HARD STUFF (Mysterious Press, 311 pp., $26), opens with Joe Brody in a car with three strangers, on their way to New Jersey to kill a man. On most work nights, Joe can be found arming the door at a Mafiaowned strip joint, the Club Rendezvous, "talking down drunks, extracting gropers and defusing fights." But when he was in the military, Joe specialized in killing people, and he's managed to hang onto that skill set, which occasionally comes in handy. Like now, when a coalition of mob bosses makes him their unofficial "sheriff" and directs him to make some shady heroin suppliers disappear. For no good reason except the fun of it, that assignment somehow necessitates pulling off a complicated diamond heist. Gordon's quirky characters and offbeat humor take the sting out of some action scenes of horrific violence. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Kirkus Review
Veteran sleuth Faith Fairchild (The Body in the Casket, 2017, etc.) finds other fish to fry when she vacations on Sanpere Island, Maine.Despite the summer's record-breaking heat, Penobscot Bay holds pleasures aplenty for Faith. There are porches to loll on, like the one at The Birches, her younger friend Sophie Maxwell's family home; Bar Harbor rockers to admire; and lots and lots of family history to absorb, starting with learning Sophie's much-married mother Babs' five last names. Now that Faith's best friend Pix Miller's daughter, Samantha, is getting ready to marry Zach Cohen, there's a wedding to plan, with all the attendant food and festivities. So when Faith finds a dead body in Lily Pond, she really doesn't have time to think much about it except to notice an odd-looking tattoo on the young victim's arm. The corpse gets pushed even further from the spotlight when Zach's mother, Alexandra, comes to town and does her best to upend Pix's carefully laid wedding plans. Pix, Faith, and Alexandra all enroll in a course on writing memoirs; Faith's daughter, Amy, has an increasingly demanding job at the Shores, a local resort run by Dr. and Mrs. Childs; and the summer wears on and on. The dead body is barely mentioned for the next hundred pages, until a second, similarly tattooed corpse is found. Even then, Faith keeps her promise to husband Tom not to investigate, and the case solves itself when the killers push their greed a step too far.When the heroine can't summon much interest in the murder, it's hard to imagine readers will either. This one's strictly for fans of Down East local color. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's an unusual summer for caterer Faith Fairchild. While she and husband Tom are spending it on their beloved Sanpere Island, ME, he's working on a book on one side of the island, and she has time for her friends on the other. Their daughter, Amy, is laboring for long hours in the kitchen at a new conference center. Faith's worrywart friend, Pix Miller, is planning daughter Samantha's wedding, and all of Pix's worst nightmares come true when Samantha's future mother-in-law unexpectedly shows up with over-the-top plans. Faith's quiet summer blows up when she discovers a body in her favorite pond. Then she and Tom find another body. Both victims have a tattoo in common, as well as connections to a town in the drug chain that extends from Colombia to Maine. The vivid summer island lifestyle, intended to be family-oriented, turns dark with the interference of opioids, and an addiction that hits close to home. The 25th outing for Faith Fairchild, following The Body in the Casket, is marked by a celebration of family and friends for fans of the series. VERDICT Traditional yet timely, this mystery also confronts the opioid crisis head-on in a dramatic, disturbing way. [See Prepub Alert, 11/5/18.]-Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.