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Summary
Summary
Massachusetts minister's wife, caterer, and sometime amateur sleuth Faith Fairchild returns in The Body in the Boudoir, the twentieth installment in the Agatha Award-winning mystery series by Katherine Hall Page that provides mystery, heart, wit, suspense, and mouthwatering recipes aplenty.
Page turns back the clock this time to 1990, as a young Faith Sibley prepares to wed the love of her life, Thomas Fairchild...if she can survive a malefactor who's trying to disrupt the ceremony by doing away with the bride. Fans of cozy culinary mysteries, like the bestselling Goldy Schultz novels of Diane Mott Davidson, will adore the tasty mayhem Katherine Hall Page cooks up in her Boudoir.
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
Set in 1990 New York City, Agatha-winner Page's satisfying 20th Faith Fairchild mystery (after 2011's The Body in the Gazebo) flashbacks to the whirlwind romance that led to Faith Sibley's engagement to the Rev. Tom Fairchild. Despite the carefully laid plans for a perfect wedding, someone appears to be making attempts on Faith's life-and Faith has no idea who it is. Could the person determined to do her in, heaven forbid, be a Sibley family member or one of Tom's disapproving Massachusetts relations? Meanwhile, her sister, Hope, asks Faith to help her discover who's stealing her business clients. In addition, Faith's former employee, Francesca, appears to want her family in Italy to believe she's living in England, not New York, so there's plenty to distract Faith before the wedding-if there is a wedding. Cozy fans will be enthralled. Agent: Faith Hamlin, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The award-winning Page adds a creative twist to her long-running Faith Fairchild series by having the narrative travel back in time to when Faith met her husband. The story is set in 1990, with Faith running a catering business. She meets Tom at an event and, soon enough, is planning to close her business and move with him to Aleford to become a minister's wife. While planning the wedding, she has some serious accidents, which may not be accidents at all. Then she finds a body in her Great Uncle Sky's house. Finally, while finishing her last catering events, she becomes involved helping her assistant find a missing person. The busy bride-to-be capably sorts out all the issues while getting to know her future in-laws. This fun yet intelligent and layered look at the story behind a favorite series will be devoured by fans and attract new readers. Page fans may also enjoy G. M. Malliet.--Alessio, Amy Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Joseph Olshan has stepped up and written one for the home team. CLOUDLAND (Minotaur, $24.99) is set in the bleak Upper Connecticut River Valley that forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, a place where spring doesn't arrive until it's summer. Catherine Winslow, whose intimate narrative voice keeps directing our eyes to the beauty of this stark landscape, is taking a walk when she comes upon the half-frozen body of a woman in a pink parka, strangled and stabbed and left beneath an apple tree to spend the past winter under a blanket of snow. Olshan handles some genre conventions clumsily. Although the victim is the sixth woman in two years found murdered in the same fashion, the police investigation is undermanned and sloppily managed. It's also implausible that both the lead detective and the consulting forensic psychiatrist, who just happens to live up the road from Catherine, would use her as a sounding board. But the shaky mechanics don't matter so much once Olshan gets down to the real business of observing the destructive impact the killings have on this isolated region. This is the kind of rural community where the transplanted urban professionals living on Cloudland Road normally get along just fine with Yankee farmers like Hiram Osmond, a secondgeneration knacker who butchers dead farm animals, renders their carcasses and sells the good parts to people who like to decorate with skulls. Now neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye. The characters are complicated, and none more so than Catherine, who's struggling to recover from the painful breakup of an affair with a former student that cost her a good teaching job and caused a rift with her daughter. Although Olshan is merciful to all the cruel lovers, faithless spouses and angry children who live in this lonely place, the bracing clarity of his prose doesn't allow for false sentiment. (He describes one savagely mutilated murder victim as lying "as still as a deepforest kill.") When speaking of matters like romantic obsession and violence in close relationships, a voice like that really cuts through the air of a cold climate. James Runcie, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, has written the coziest of cozy murder mysteries. SIDNEY CHAMBERS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH (Bloomsbury, paper, $16) is a collection of stories set in a quaint English village during the 1950s and featuring a young Anglican vicar who finds spiritual inspiration in criminal investigation. Addressing certain suspicions about the suicide of a local solicitor, Canon Sidney Chambers, the new vicar of the church of St. Andrew and St. Mary in Grantchester, is reminded that "how we love determines how we live." And investigating the theft of a valuable ring during an elegant London dinner party leads him to wonder how much a person can change over the course of a lifetime. No matter how much fun he derives from his sleuthing, Sidney tells himself that solving a tough case can teach him a moral lesson: "how to live an honorable life and protect the greater good." Taken individually, each of these clerical whodunits poses a clever puzzle for armchair detectives. Viewed as a collective study of British life as it was lived when Elizabeth II first ascended the throne, these stories present a consistently charming and occasionally cutting commentary on "a postwar landscape full of industry, promise and concrete." Psychological suspense is the genre of choice for glorifying the bond between mother and child: mother rushes into burning building, sacrifices life to save child, earns place in paradise. More than a flip paradigm, that's the actual plot of AFTERWARDS (Crown, $25), a gripping novel by Rosamund Lupton about a mother's nightmare. Grace Covey is among the proud parents on the field for sports day at the Sidley House Preparatory School when a fire breaks out inside the building. Cut to the hospital, where Grace is in a coma with brain injuries and her "appallingly hurt" 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, is in the burn unit. To add to her woes, Grace's 8-year-old son, Adam, is suspected of having set the fire. The eerie thing is, both Grace and Jenny have slipped out of their damaged bodies and become ghostly detectives, which takes considerable pluck and ingenuity. The second-person narrative voice assigned to Grace has its limitations, mainly because it's addressed to her wooden and inconsequential husband. "Be kinder to your wife," she's compelled to admonish him. "Out-of-body experiences do happen." Readers who might have drifted away from Katherine Hall Page's pleasing mysteries starring Faith Fairchild, the congenitally curious wife of a New England minister and the proprietor of a catering company wittily named "Have Faith," should accept the homecoming invitation extended in THE BODY IN THE BOUDOIR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $23.99). Although it's the 20th book in the series, the story is set in 1990, when Faith is still single, living in Manhattan and about to be swept off her feet by a young cleric she meets while catering a wedding at the Riverside Church. After their storybook courtship, Faith is making wedding plans when someone at her bridal shower tries to poison her. To be honest, the attempts on Faith's life are pallid compared with the retro fun of perusing a vintage wedding menu, shopping at Bergdorf 's bridal salon and having tea at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. Shallow pleasures, perhaps. But that's just the way it is. After a string of murders in a remote valley, neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye.
Kirkus Review
Which matters more, the ingredients in the wedding cake or the clauses in the pre-nup? On the flight to Italy to celebrate their anniversary, caterer Faith Fairchild (The Body in the Gazebo, 2011, etc.) reminiscences about the prelude to her marriage to Tom, which included such semi-disasters as her sister's betrayal by her beau, her future sister-in-law's pesky attempts to reunite Tom with their next-door neighbor, one assistant's leaving to open her own restaurant, another's search for a missing World War II veteran who done her granny wrong, and, oh yes, four attempts on Faith's own life, one by food poisoning, another by a shove on a subway platform, a third by a bit of falling brickwork at her Uncle Sky's estate, and one more when the brakes on a car she'd borrowed gave out. Unlike Faith, Sky's housekeeper couldn't escape someone's murderous urges. While she lolled about in Sky's wife's boudoir dolled up in her marabou-trimmed peignoir, someone crept in, whacked her dead, then slithered out, resurfacing days later to incinerate the poor woman's sister and brother-in-law in a propane fire. Would Faith's wedding have to be cancelled, or at least postponed? Of course not. After all, the champagne had already been ordered, and all the relatives were certainly willing to cover up the scandal caused by one of their own. Includes recipes, menus, drink concoctions and much charm, but a denouement so silly that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The 20th entry in Page's Agatha Award-winning series (after The Body in the Gazebo) has caterer and amateur sleuth Faith Fairchild recalling 1990, when she almost became a hit-and-run victim on her wedding day. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
