Death Hits the Fan
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Kate Jasper, Marin County, California’s own organically grown amateur sleuth, returns in this ninth mystery in the series.
Kate and her sweetie visit Ivan Nakagawa’s bookstore for an author signing in Death Hits the Fan. The event features three authors and only a few more audience members, but the small audience does not stop Yvette Cassell from reading on and on as fellow author S. X. (Shayla) Greenfree’s eyelids droop and she slumps forward. Kate is shocked by Shayla’s novel approach to boredom. But it turns out that Shayla is not just dozing, she is dead. Is the murderer’s unique signature the bracelet that Shayla snapped on before falling over? The police read an accusation into Shayla’s last utterance of “Kate, I . . . ” before Shayla slumped. But Kate did not even know Shayla. Or did she? The handwriting is on the wall. Can Kate read it before the murderer plots a sequel?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A bookstore reading in a Marin County, Calif., independent bookstore turns fatal when one of the writers dies of poisoning in the talky ninth Kate Jasper tale (after 1997's A Cry for Self-Help). Kate and her fiance, restaurateur Wayne, are in the audience, having fled their skunk-infested house and troublesome human houseguest. Three authors--working in mystery and science fiction--have been invited to participate in the reading. S.X. Greenfree, the best known of the three, puts on a bracelet left at her place at the table and almost immediately keels over dead, leaving the focus of suspicion trained on the audience. Wayne and other curious attendees talk to everyone who was present, including a rare book dealer, the store owner and his teenage son and a larcenous employee. When the employee is found dead in the store's back room in what might be an accident, Kate and Wayne step up their investigation. Based on the premise that genre writers have kooky personalities, this disjointed story is long on pointless dialogue and short on action.
