Katherine Hall Page

This, the 14th entry in the Faith Fairchild cozy series, reintroduces Richard Morgan, the one-time wealthy, one-time boyfriend of Faith Fairchild from before Faith married and still lived the fashionable life in New York City. (Richard first appeared in the forgettable tenth novel in the series, The Body in the Big Apple.) But then Faith encounters Richard in a Boston soup kitchen — not as a volunteer, but as a client! What’s happened in the past 13 years?

At the same time, Faith finds a show more diary in the attic of her rental house, where she, her husband and two children are living for a semester while Reverend Tom Fairchild is teaching at Harvard Divinity School on sabbatical. In the 1946 diary, a new bride is being held hostage in the attic by her sadistic husband. (So, yes, the title is a misnomer; Faith doesn’t find a body in the attic, just evidence of somebody being held against her will.) So Faith is snooping in two different cases.

The Body in the Attic is amongst the best in the series: a real page-turner I couldn’t go down. It may be cliché, but in this case it was five stars’ worth of truth. show less

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Description: During her years spent in New York City. Faith Fairchild was convinced she had seen pretty much everything. But the transplanted caterer/minister's wife was unprepared for the surprises awaiting her in the sleepy Massachusetts village of Aleford. And she is especially taken aback by the dead body of a pretty young thing she discovers stashed in the church's belfry. The victim, Cindy Shepherd. was well-known locally for her acid tongue and her jilted show more beaux, which created a lot of bad blood and more than a few possible perpetrators — including her luckless fiance, who had neither an alibi nor a better way to break off the engagement. Faith thinks it's terribly unfair that the police have zeroed in on the hapless boyfriend, and so she sets out to uncover the truth. But digging too deeply into the sordid secrets of a small New England village tends to make the natives nervous. And an overly curious big city lady can become just another small town death statistic in very short order.

My Review: BAD First Mystery Novel Syndrome: Introduce characters that Central Casting would find rich and nuanced, but the Experienced Mysterian finds barely three-dimensional.

Then kill people that have blindingly obvious connections to each other, and to a cast of interchangeable Cozy Village Populators. Extra points (off) for including ancestor worshiping elders in a New England setting as major plot movers. Throw in a white cop from the Bronx as a detective with a Noo Yawk attitude. Ugh.

Describe your sleuth and her family with phrases so stock as to cause the Experienced Mysterian to make a mental police-artist drawing with attendant level of accuracy.

Set your story in a small New England stereotype of a town during the fall and have the transplanted New Yorker sleuth comment on the scenery and the weather without the slightest hint of fresh observation or even any believable motivation for her to so much as notice them.

Reveal the killer in such a way as to cause maximum snorts of derision and impatient huffing. The killer's identity was, I admit, not a standard choice, and so this first novel got an extra half star.

It's the first novel of NINETEEN in the series to date. If my very, very, very favorite porn star slipped into bed next to me, whispered disgusting and salacious suggestions of what he'd like me to do to him, and then said I had to read the second in the series before I was allowed to, I'd read the next one.

Otherwise, no. I have Ambien for sleeplessness, and while not as effective as this book in conkin' me out, it hurts less. show less

I enjoyed this, although it's not really much of a mystery. But I like that the characters are flawed, and not in an attempt to be funny, rather just to make them seem more human, I guess. Of course there were some very cheesy lines. One of the final paragraphs reads:
"He stood up and Faith walked straight into his arms. They held each other the way soldiers home from battle hold their loved ones.
They were both crying."

Don't you want to gag? Thankfully there were not too many of those!

Faith Fairchild, a trust-fund baby-turned-caterer born and bred in New York City’s West Side, has relocated to New England to follow her pastor husband Tom to his parish in Aleford, Massachusetts. With a new baby and no job but preacher’s wife, Faith greatly misses her go-go life in the Big Apple where she literally catered to the City’s High Society. Nothing exciting happens in Aleford! Until it does.

Faith finds raven-haired siren Cindy Shepherd, a girl as scheming as she was show more beautiful, stabbed to death in the town’s belfry. Cindy’s slow-witted boyfriend Dave is accused, but both Faith and Tom know that’s not the case. Thus does author Katherine Hall Page usher in a most delightful cozy series. I never suspected the murderer, although the ending was a bit unlikely. Still, I loved aspiring, kind Faith so much that I’ve already ordered the next in the series, The Body in the Kelp. show less