A Clue for the Puzzle Lady (Puzzle Lady Mysteries) (original 1999; edition 2000)

Crosswords and barely likeable characters. More please. ( )

A book with a lot of nice touches, not necessarily so much for cruciverbalists but for logophiles. The repartee between the niece and the reporter is handled expertly. The main character combines a very Miss Marple-ish character with the paradoxical habit of regularly going out on a bender, which makes an amusing mix. I didn't care for the ineptness of the police chief, and the subplot concerning him possibly losing his job comes across as something thrown in to fill space. On the other hand, the cold case subplot works really well, and the revealing of the murderer is paced nicely. I suppose if you must have a dramatic confrontation with weapons to finish a mystery, you must.

All in all, not a bad first series book. I'll get another one if I run across it, to see if it is the sort of series that gets better as it goes along. ( )

First Line: The first clue came with a corpse.

Police Chief Dale Harper finds himself investigating his very first homicide when the body of an unknown girl turns up in the cemetery of the small town of Bakerhaven, Connecticut. A strange clue leads him to consult Bakerhaven's celebrity, Cora Felton-- otherwise known as the Puzzle Lady for her syndicated column of crossword puzzles.

That was Harper's first mistake because Cora's meddling drives him crazy and makes her niece, Sherry, want to rip out her hair. When another body turns up that hits close to home, Cora's got to put her puzzle-solving skills in high gear before she becomes the next victim.

Beware requesting books like this secondhand. If you're not lucky (like I wasn't), you'll get a copy of the book in which a previous owner has already worked the crossword puzzle... in ink. With that precautionary tale out of the way, let's get to the book.

While I didn't find myself solving the mystery and had to wait for the author to do it for me (a definite plus), there were things that bothered me about this first book in the series.

The fact that Police Chief Dale Harper kept returning to Cora and her niece for help was one of them. I could see it if they were giving him substantive help, but they weren't. This gave me the impression that Harper was, indeed, out of his depth.

The character of Cora Felton herself pushed one of my hot buttons. (I don't have many, so it can be dire if one of them is activated.) Her meddling was amusing, and it was fun to see her tie her niece, Sherry, in knots. I also liked Cora the cardsharp always trying to get a game of cards going, but... the woman is a person who drinks to excess then gets behind the wheel of a car and drives (weaves) her way home. That is my hot button, which has something to do with my having had an alcoholic in the family. That whole drunk thing just isn't funny to me. At. All.

Her niece, Sherry, is trying to take care of her aunt while she's avoiding an abusive ex-husband. Local journalist Aaron Grant takes a shine to the young woman, and their witty banter at first is fun, but it goes on way too long.

A Clue for the Puzzle Lady has a good mystery and very good pacing, but I had a few too many problems with the characters, and not all of those problems were personal. Of course, there is another way of looking at this-- if the characterizations weren't good, then these fictional people wouldn't get under my skin the way they did! ( )

Cora Felton is a Bakerhaven legend, or at least eccentric. As the creator of a syndicated weekly crossword puzzle column, she's even known outside of her small community. So when Police Chief Harper discovers a body with a crossword clue on a slip in the girl's pocket, he decides to pay a call on Cora and also meets her niece Sherry Carter. Harper needs to prove he was the right chief for the town to have hired. Although Cora's feeling a bit hung-over at the time, after a cigarette and a morning Bloody Mary, she feels an obligation to help in any way she can. Sherry's a bit more worried about how they'll live if her aunt's lifestyle becomes widely known. Together the nervous Sherry, wild Cora, and pragmatic Harper may just catch a killer. The 12th Puzzle Lady mystery, The KenKen Killings, comes out in January 2011. Each book includes at least one crossword puzzle written by Cora and tied into the plot. Some of Hall's more recent books have incorporated sudoku puzzles as well as crosswords, and include samples of both puzzles.

Cora Felton is the grandmotherly, nationally syndicated 'Puzzle Lady' whose crossword puzzle greets newspaper readers every morning. She has a dread secret, though. Far from her wholesome image, Cora is a drunk and a bit of a floozy. Worse, the crosswords she's known for are in fact created by her niece Shelly, who is living with Cora in a small town in hopes of evading her abusive former husband. These secrets are threatened when Cora is drawn into a local murder investigation based on her supposed expertise on crosswords. A fairly lighthearted cozy, this is the first of a series. ( )