Wild Goose Chase-Terri Thayer

Wild Goose Chase
Terri Thayer
Midnight Ink, Feb 2008, $13.95, 312 pp.
ISBN: 9780738712154

It has been six months since her mother died and Dewey Pellicano is doing her best to hold herself together. She lost her IT job, so is running the store Quilter Paradiso her mother left to her. Currently she rents a booth at the seventeenth annual Northern California Quilt Extravaganza. She is putting the store online thanks to an expensive program her mother bought a week before she died. Her sister-in-law Kym, who works at the store, sabotages her efforts wanting it done the old fashioned way and Dewey walks a way in a huff.

She runs into quilting celebrity Claire Armstrong who offers to buy the store from her. She needs time to think about it and then decides to go to Claire’s room to talk about it some more. Claire’s assistant Myra lets her in and they see Claire dead. She bled out from an accident with a yellow-handled rotary cutter. When the police arrive she is glad to see Detective Buster Healey is one of them because her friend makes he feel less like a suspect in what turns out to be a murder. A few days later, Dewey agrees to sell her store to Myra but another death occurs at a rehearsal for the Quilter’s fashion show. Again Dewey is made to look like the killer but she knows someone is setting up the evidence to make it look that way and she intends to find out who it is.

WILD GOOSE CHASE is a delightful cozy that gives readers an insider’s look at a quilting fair. The heroine is doing her best to hold it all together even before she became the prime suspect in two homicide investigations while wondering if she is doing the right thing by selling her mom’s heritage. The support cast acts realistic and the few eccentric amongst them add a touch of humor to the serious storyline. Terri Thayer creates an excellent amateur sleuth mystery in which the audience will believe a desperate Dewey follows the clues one stitch at a time.

Harriet Klausner