A Lie for a Lie-Emilie Richards

A Lie for a Lie
Emilie Richards
Berkley, Feb 2009, $7.99
ISBN: 9780425226643

In Emerald Springs, Ohio, the minister's wife Aggie Sloan-Wilcox tries to live up to the image of her position, but has a talent of finding dead bodies and determining who killed them. The new group in town is Sister Nora’s Inspirational Tent Show, a circus whose acts comes straight out of the bible. Aggie likes the woman who says she hears God and he is telling her to build a biosphere in Emerald Springs so when pollution makes survival impossible, some remnants of humanity will be saved.

Aggie is also working on a committe for the Emerald Springs Idyll talent show, a fundraiser to build a children’s hospital. Judging the acts will be Grady Berber, a local who made it in Hollywood. Aggie is an assistant to Grady’s assistant and she learns he is a pampered mean spirited individual who angrily takes out his displeasures on others. When Aggie enters his room, she finds Grady dead; his neck slashed by a knife like one used at Nora’s circus. On the nearby wall the letters NOR is written; the police believe Nora, who is Grady’s ex-wife, killed him. Aggie believes otherwise, but is unaware how much danger she places herself and her daughter in from an alert murderer.

This is a jewel of a book; a creative cozy that will fascinate readers as it does Aggie first by Grady’s temper tantrums and then his death. There are plenty of people who firmly believed the world would be a better place if Grady was in hell rather than making everyone else’s life one. The lead police investigator and Aggie’s husband would prefer she stay out of the inquiry, but don’t bother to tell her so as they know better. Fans of small Midwestern town mysteries will enjoy A LIE FOR A LIE that is as much a look at life in Emerald Springs as it is a whodunit.

Harriet Klausner