Widow's Wreath

Widow’s Wreath proves very different than most of author ’s Martha’s Vineyard novels. The perennially 92-year-old poet, gardener and sage Victoria Trumbull seems crankier than usual. But she deploys her status as West Tisbury’s oldest police deputy to help solve the murder of a man left in Victoria’s own musty basement.

In this 14th novel in the series, Victoria’s feather-brained distant cousin Penny Arbuthnot will be marrying in less than a week and is having her reception at Victoria’s home. She’s marrying into a wealthy New York Italian family with some sinister ties. So with the corpse in the basement, an off-Islander clearly there for the wedding, Victoria and the police begin trying to unravel what’s really going show more on.

The mystery is clever and off-beat, but that’s not the real charm of these books. Riggs, the 13th generation of her family to live on Martha's Vineyard, knows the island inside and out; her descriptions make you feel the chill of the fog, taste the bourbon and water, and smell the garden flowers, including the titular flower. (Are they bridal wreath, as most people call them? Or widow’s wreath, as Victoria and her grandmother always termed them? You’ll need to read to find out!) May Riggs, now nearly as old as Victoria herself, keep writing these gems. show less

Widow’s Wreath is the fourteenth book in the Martha’s Vineyard Mystery series.

I’ve enjoyed the other books in this series, but this one not as much. For me, there were too many suspects introduced early on in the book and it seems to take a while to learn that the wrong person had been killed. It took me a while to get everybody straight and their reasons for wanting the same person dead.

Victoria Trumball has agreed to host her 25-year-old distant cousin’s, Penny, wedding to Rocco Bufano. An electrician, Mark Johnson comes to Victoria’s home to upgrade the wiring that will be needed to support the need of additional electricity for the reception. Johnson soon asks Victoria what he should do with the scarecrow hanging in the show more basement. He soon learns that it is no scarecrow but in fact the body of a man that has been strangled.

Victoria wonders whether this was a good idea when she also learns that Penny has gone deeply into debt to fund the wedding and reception. The wedding, as it turns out, is a matter of convenience. Both of them think the other is rich and their answer to pay off their debts. The police are having difficulty identifying the body, but they feel that Rocco is not being completely honest when asked to identify the body. It seems that just about all of the guests and even the wedding party end up coming under suspicion. It will become clear that Rocco is the intended victim and the police will need to find the killer before someone else is murdered.

This is a well developed and interesting story with many interesting and believable characters. I would like to see future books to more like the earlier books.

I will be watching for future books in this entertaining series. show less

I am a bit bewildered. This should be a cozy mystery but the cozy part is somewhat lacking and the mystery is a bit confused.
There is no heroine asking questions but a set of scenes and different stories. Being a bit confused I don't know if I liked or not :(
Many thanks to Crooked Lane Books and Netgalley