Donna Andrews
Owl's Well That Ends Well (2005)
Author: Donna Andrews
Genre: Mystery/Amateur/Soft-boiled
Plot Summary:
Meg Langslow, a commitment- and clutter-phobe, buys a house with her boyfriend Michael, a college professor fighting for tenure. The great price on the house comes with one caveat - it includes the previous owner's junk, which fills every story of the house and the barn. So Meg corrals her crazy family into a massive yard sale! Meg tries to keep Hummel-obsessed old ladies and meddling cousins out of the barn, which houses a family of endangered owls. Then the body of the town's least popular resident (a conniving antiques dealer) is found dead in a trunk. Meg struggles to clear the main suspect, who also happens to be on Michael's tenure committee, while keeping her mother from completely redecorating her now-empty house.
Geographical Setting: Virginia
Time Period: present
Series: The sixth Meg Langslow mystery
Appeal Characteristics:
The characterization is very strong in this series; Meg stands out as a smart but put-upon woman, a little bitter but still likable. Her family is huge and insane - cousins come out of the woodwork and do crazy things like sell old lingerie and operate boom lifts. The pacing of the book is very fast - the demands of the secondary characters on Meg make the pace almost exhausting. But Meg's narration is funny and sarcastic, so you don't want to kill yourself. There are twists throughout the story (characters trying to hide details from the police), and one final twist at the end. The subject matter is also appealing - anyone who's every experienced the inside of a multi-family yard sale will relate to this book. Because the main suspect is a professor, there are inside jokes about academia that will appeal to some readers. Some other subjects made light of in the book are owl conservationists, fat people in lingerie, tow truck drivers, and hippies.
Read-alikes: The first Meg Langslow mystery, Murder with Peacocks (1999) has Meg juggling three weddings. Andrews has also written a series of cozy techno-thrillers featuring an Artificial Intelligence Personality and a programmer, beginning with the Agatha-winning You've Got Murder (2003). Andrews's funny writing style has been compared to that of Janet Evanovich; although Evanovich is not cozy, her Trenton, NJ-based Stephanie Plum series is full of wacky secondary characters. Start with the first, One for the Money (1994). Another humorous cozy series featuring an amateur detective (and some great book titles) is M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin; the first is Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992). Finally, the pace of Andrews's novels might attract readers to a gentler (but not gentle) crime caper like Laurence Shames's Mangrove Squeeze (1998), about a hippie Key West shop owner who unwittingly becomes a target for the Russian mafia.
Red Flags: none.
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