Murder Outside the Lines
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
With Halloween just around the corner, the fall colors in Georgetown are brilliant. As manager of the Color Me Read bookstore, coloring book creator Florrie Fox has arranged for psychic author Hilda Rattenhorst to read from Spooktacular Ghost Stories. But the celebrity medium arrives for the event in hysterics, insisting she just saw a bare foot sticking out of a rolled-up carpet in a nearby alley. Is someone trying to sweep murder under the rug? Florrie calls in her policeman beau, Sergeant Eric Jonquille, but the carpet corpse has disappeared without a trace. Then in the middle of her reading, Hilda chillingly declares that she feels the killer's presence in the store. Is this a publicity stunt or a genuine psychic episode? It seems there's no happy medium. When a local bibliophile is soon discovered missing, a strange mystery begins to unroll. Now it's up to Florrie and Jonquille to expose a killer's true colors . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's almost Halloween in Davis's enjoyable third Pen and Ink mystery (after 2018's The Coloring Crook), and coloring book designer Florrie Fox, the manager of the Color Me Read bookshop in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, arranges for psychic Hilda Rattenhorst, the author of Spooktacular Ghost Stories, to sign her books at the shop. Hilda staggers into the event and announces that she has seen a murder. When pressed for details, she says that she saw a foot protruding from a rolled-up carpet. The police believe Hilda was the victim of a Halloween prank. A few hours later, as Florrie is walking home, she hears a commotion coming from the house of Cyril Oldfield, a loyal Color Me Read customer. She rushes in and finds Cyril lying on the floor, his throat slashed, barely alive. Other strange occurrences lead her to believe that a murderer is stalking the streets of Georgetown. Florrie makes a charming sleuth, and the well-paced plot is just complicated enough to keep readers guessing. Hopefully, Florrie will be back soon.
