The Body in the Web
A Faith Fairchild Mystery
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The 26th book in the award-winning Faith Fairchild Mysteries series.
Katherine Hall Page’s beloved amateur detective gets wrapped up in a Zoom-bombing scandal that sends her community into a tailspin … just as a dead body is discovered.
Faith Fairchild joins the rest of the world in lockdown mode when reality flips in March 2020. As the pandemic spreads, Faith and her family readjust to life together in Aleford, Massachusetts. Her husband, Tom, continues his sermons from Zoom; their children, Ben, who's in college, and Amy, a high school senior, are doing remote learning at home .
Faith is happy to have her family under the same roof and grateful for her resilient community, friends, and neighbors in Aleford. Town halls remain lively and well-attended, despite residents joining from their living rooms. It is at one of these town halls that scandal breaks out. In the midst of a Zoom meeting, damaging images suddenly flash upon everyone’s screens. Claudia, local art teacher and Faith’s dear friend, is immediately recognized as the woman who has been targeted.
When Claudia is later discovered dead, Faith, with the help of her friends, journeys deep into the dark web to unravel the threads of Claudia’s mysterious history and shocking passing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Page's long-running cozy series featuring caterer and amateur sleuth Faith Fairchild begins to show its age in this humdrum entry (after 2019's The Body in the Wake). Thanks to an advance warning from her sister that Covid-19 lockdowns are imminent, Faith is able to stock her business and home in Aleford, Mass., with vital supplies, and carves out a pleasant-enough existence for the rest of 2020, laying low with her children and reverend husband. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when a 2021 virtual State of the Town meeting is flooded with pornographic images of one of Faith's close friends. When the same woman is found dead a few days later, Faith is certain it's murder, and she digs into her late friend's foggy past to determine who might be responsible. Newcomers not already invested in Faith and her family are likely to find the setup, which focuses heavily on the early days of the pandemic and takes up nearly a third of the narrative, a bit dull, and while the investigation itself sufficiently quickens the pace, its resolution hinges on an unsatisfying contrivance. This is run-of-the-mill genre fare.
