When school psychologist Skye Denison stumbles over the body of pushy "Promfest" chairperson Annette Paine during a Halloween fundraiser, it looks like a clear-cut case of promicide. Annette was not the only prom mom desperate to see her daughter crowned queen. But she was also wearing the same witch costume as Skye, so which witch was the intended victim?
Дениз Суонсон
Tales and Treats, a new independent bookstore in the small town of Scumble River, Ill., arouses passions even before it opens in Swanson's lackluster 13th mystery featuring school psychologist Skye Denison (after 2010's Murder of a Wedding Belle). Conservative protesters as well as local business owners like Skye's used-car dealer cousin, Hugo Leofanti, view Tales and Treats as a threat. Soon after the bookstore's controversial opening, Skye discovers a woman crushed under a bookcase of rare books. Improbably even for a cozy, Skye's fiancé, police chief Wally Boyd, allows her to take the lead in interviewing suspects, many of whom are related to her. The efforts of Skye's former boyfriend, Simon Reid, to win her back add some romantic tension, but weak humor and plotting make this a forgettable entry in the series.
When mega-millionaire and imitation cowboy Rex Taylor proposes building a country music theater in Scumble River, everyone's ready to do the boot-scootin' boogie except school psychologist Skye Denison. She's been asked by Suzette Neal, Rex's assistant and a rising country star, to investigate her mother's suspicious death twenty-seven years earlier. No sooner does Skye agree to help than she finds Suzette literally flattened -- and very dead. Now there are two mysterious deaths -- a mother and twenty-seven years later, her daughter. Suspicion seems to be hovering over Suzette's inner circle: Rex's jealous wife, a mysterious man in a black pickup truck, and the sizzling-hot singer Flint James, who also happens to have been Suzette's bitter rival for country-western fame. With a honky-tonk full of suspects and a tangled web of motives that stretches back two decades, Skye already knows too much. She must rise to the occasion or she could be the next one to end up flat as a cräaepe suzette.