Death of a Russian Doll
A Vintage Toy Shop Mystery
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Just in time for the holidays, fans of Leslie Meier and Vicki Delany are going to want to pick up the charming third installment in Barbara Early’s Vintage Toy Shop mysteries.
It’s all fun and games with toyshop owner Liz McCall until deadly secrets are unwrapped upon the eve of the holidays.
Who knew? Liz McCall is not thrilled when her boyfriend Police Chief Ken Young introduces her to his estranged wife Marya. The model-quality Russian immigrant, back in East Aurora to rekindle their romance, will be working as a hairstylist at the barber shop next door to Well Played, the toyshop Liz manages for her dad. When Marya offers to help with the shop’s doll rehab project, Liz can’t help but offer up only a weak smile, but her secret hesitations are for naught when Marya’s body is discovered in the barber shop with a hair dryer cord wrapped around her neck.
Liz’s dad, retired from the police force, is asked to investigate since Ken is the prime suspect.The whole town is abuzz with the scandal and Liz has a few questions of her own, wanting nothing more than to forget the loud argument she overheard between Marya and Ken the night before. There could have been other motives...Was Marya going to cut into a competing hairstylist business? Who is the bumbling private investigator hanging around and why won’t he explain himself?
All eyes are on Liz, including those of an odd matryoshka doll in the shop which seems to move of its own accord, to unravel this entertaining riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that is Death of a Russian Doll, the third jolly Vintage Toy Shop mystery from Barbara Early.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Early's appealing third Vintage Toyshop mystery (after 2017's Murder on the Toy Town Express), the budding romance between Liz McCall, who works in her father's vintage toy shop in East Aurora, N.Y., and Ken Young, the town's police chief, abruptly ends when Ken's beautiful Russian wife, Marya, breezes into town and quickly finds work at the hair salon next to the toy shop. When Marya is found strangled with the cord of a hair dryer, Ken is in the sticky position of being a person of interest for the police force he heads. This problem is solved when the mayor appoints Liz's dad, the former police chief, to step in as interim chief until the killer is apprehended. The plot is complex enough, Liz and her gang of relatives and friends are entertaining, and the descriptions of the array of vintage toys create a nice mood of nostalgia. This quick and easy cozy is as comfy as its narrator's well-worn Scooby-Doo pajamas.