Murder Plays House
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Bad Mother and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits--a mystery series featuring a Los Angeles mom...
With a new arrival on the way, the Applebaum household is bursting at the seams. And Juliet is balancing clue-chasing and diaper-changing with a new task: house-hunting…
Juliet loves her kids. She loves their dirty little faces and skinned knees. She loves the ridiculous and amazing things they say. But when three-and-a-half year old Isaac evicts her husband and her from their own bed one night, love is the last thing on her mind. Juliet now recognizes the need for a few changes…starting with a bigger house. And when the new baby arrives, they’ll welcome the extra space.
But if there’s ever a bad time to search for a new house in L.A., it’s now. In a buyer-unfriendly real estate market, one practically has to kill to find an affordable home. No wonder Juliet is prepared to over look a corpse on the grounds of her would-be dream house. To salve her conscience—and get her foot literally in the front door—she vows to find the killer of the homeowner’s sister. The investigation leads her from the madness of house-hunting into a world of washed-up actors and canceled TV shows, a world more depraved than she could ever have imagined…
“[Juliet is] a lot like Elizabeth Peters’ warm and humorous Amelia Peabody—a brassy, funny, quick-witted protagonist.”—Houston Chronicle
Ayelet Waldman is the author of numerous books including Love and Treasure and the Mommy-Track Mysteries featuring Juliet Applebaum. The series includes such titles as The Big Nap, A Playdate with Death, and Death Gets a Time-Out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Waldman's fifth well-plotted Mommy-Track mystery (after 2003's Death Gets a Time-Out), PI and former public defender Juliet Applebaum, with another baby on the way, needs a new home almost as badly as she and her partner in her PI business, Al Hockey, need a new case. When in doubt, shop, so Juliet goes house hunting. One place she looks at really stands out the one with the body in the bath. It seems a solution is at hand to both problems: if Juliet and Al can solve the murder, then Juliet and her family can buy the house. But who would kill a washed-up, bit-part actress? The deeper Juliet and Al dig, the more motives they find for the victim to have murdered someone herself. Juliet is a wonderful invention, warm, loving and sympathetic to those in need, but unintimidated by the L.A. entertainment industry she must enter to search for clues. An underlying theme concerns the extraordinary lengths to which people go to look beautiful, and the great weight put on physical appearance in determining success in Hollywood. The suspense builds slowly it takes almost the full length of the book before a motive for the vicious killing becomes clear but what a motive, what a resolution and how clever of Juliet to figure everything out.
