This book is approximately 250 pages of pure froth and can be read in an easy afternoon. Having read it, it is likely you will have forgotten it by bedtime. It is one of a series of novels placed in Edwardian England at the Pennyfoot Hotel. A murder takes place and the proprietor of the hotel, between bouts of daydreaming about the potential for a romance with her hotel manager, becomes embroiled in solving the mystery. The characters are caricatures, the plot line is pretty much nonexistent and the author repeats herself to the point of tedium. If you're in the right mood, however, and looking for something approximating literary meringue, this might be just what you need. ( )

Thankfully things are a little better at the Pennyfoot these days. Mystery and Red Herring wise. The language and situations we are expected to believe that our staff at the hotel get into is still extremely hard to credit.

Edwardian England meets the 90's of the end of the century. "Put a sock in it." Is not very Edwardian, or even British. But when our writer has been exposed to American television culture, one can see that she falls to it. Then she has issues with prose, 'Her enormous hat was a magnificent concoction of ribbons and ostrich plumes in brilliant shades of purple and pink...' Reading this makes the entirety that much worse than it should be. The author further sites Dickens and Sherlock Holmes (not Conan Doyle) as good literature for her time. Dickens of course is fifty years prior, and Conan Doyle is very populist at the moment.

At least Kingsbury's mystery is solvable whereas some of the jumps the 'Master', Holmes made defied all logic and clues in the novels. Here there are a few clues, but the Red Herring keeps you distracted enough that the work is better than most of the previous part of the collection. There are still problems with the entirety though.

The sleuths son, such a trial in the last issue and just a few hundred feet away, is mentioned in one line in this novel. A great hotel, or converted manor house. This story she has not monopolized the Library for her office, but as a hotel the named staff seems too few. And they still suffer from an operational issue, hotel business will not wait, but here conveniently for the time of the story needing to develop, characters still forget or put off doing the daily and hourly tasks that need attention in any hotel of the period.

Pick this up and have a gander but avoid the others after the first. ( )

This book seemed to get back on track after the disappointment of the previous book (Check Out Time). I love the characters in this series, and this book lets us get to see them a lot more. Of course the maid Gertie is my favourite, but I love to watch the interplay between Cecily and Baxter as well. Cecily and Baxter are trying to solve another mystery that seems to involve their hotel. Young gypsy women are being murdered in the woods beside the hotel, and they are being discovered without their heads. And an axe seems to keep going missing from the hotel's woodshed. This is a fun series with wonderful characters set in the Georgian time period. I would recommend it to anyone who likes cozies. ( )