‘ When California single mom and suburban sleuth Kate Austen finds her friend’s corpse next to a bottle of scotch and an empty vial of sleeping pills, she doesn’t believe it’s suicide. And when a second body turns up, even handsome homicide detective Michael Stone agrees that it’s beginning to look a lot like murder.’
Blurb from the 1995 Zebra edition
So, Kate Austen heads round to her friend and client, Mona. Kate’s job is best described as artist and interior guru. She finds appropriate art for homes and offices.
Anyhoo, Kate finds Mona dead with an empty bottle of pills and a bottle of scotch beside her.
The police seem to think this is suicide but Kate and Mona’s friend Sharon think otherwise as Mona had no reason to kill herself and hated drinking Scotch.
Once more, Kate, unable to persuade her detective boyfriend to pursue the murder theory, begins to hunt for evidence.
Kate’s life is complicated by having to temporarily house Mona’s moody teenage daughter, Libby, which involves visits from a troublesome boyfriend and Mona’s annoying ex-husband, Gary.
It’s a great read. Lightweight, some amusing characters, a nice love story going on and a decent enough plot. The body count is two.
It could have done with some racial diversity since, like many of these ‘cozy’ murder mysteries, everyone seems to be white. There is a very serious lady psychiatrist who is keen to have some appropriate art for her consulting room and proves hard to please.
‘“I cannot have things like this on my walls,” she proclaimed. Things came out like dteengs and it took me a minute to figure out the word wasn’t some esoteric psychological term for crap. Because that’s what the tone implied. Disheartened but not defeated, I set up another appointment for the following week. “Plee-se,” she said as I left, “bring me some dteengs I like this time.”
If only I had some clue as to what that might be.’
Chapter 14
We presume this is some foreign accent, which is ok, given the brevity of the character’s appearance. It is not offensive, per se, although it’s a bit of a cheap device. It does, however, tend to highlight the fact that every other character is white home-grown American. In Walnut Hills, California, in the Nineteen Nineties it would surely be impossible to go through the day without having to deal in some way with someone black, or Spanish or Puerto Rican or Italian or even Jewish or Welsh.
Why do they never appear?
Bodies In The Library 