A Questionable Character (Booktown Mystery, #17)

by Lorna Barrett

The murder of a local contractor may be the final nail in the coffin for Tricia Miles in the latest entry to Lorna Barrett's New York Times bestselling Booktown series.

It's a busy summer in Booktown. Contractor Jim Stark is in great demand: he’s overseeing a number of projects, including Angelica Miles's newly constructed building on Main Street, finishing up the new brew pub, and gutting a stone mansion off Main Street that Angelica bought to be the world headquarters for Nigela Ricita Asssociates. It’ll house office space where her marketing staff and the rest of the NR Associates clerical personnel will work.

Tricia Miles and Angelica arrive at the mansion before their workday to see how the construction is going. They find the place unlocked and Stark’s right-hand man, Sanjay Arya, dead—bludgeoned to death. The loss of the contractor’s top man threatens all the projects in the works, which would effectively ruin the expensive marketing plan that the Chamber of Commerce has been working. Is Jim a suspect? (He’d be stupid to kill the person he depends on to keep the projects going.) But Stark also thinks his wife, who was very chummy with Sanjay, might have been cheating on him with the second-in-command, making him a likely suspect.

Once again Tricia finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation, but can she find the killer before he or she has the chance to bring the hammer down?

• ISBN10: 0593549414
• ISBN13: 9780593549414
• Publish Date: 18 July 2023
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780593549414

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

A Questionable Character is the 17th Booktown shopfront cozy by Lorna Barrett. Released 18th July 2023 by Penguin Random House on their Berkley imprint, it's 336 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. Paperback format due out in late 2nd quarter 2024 from the same publisher. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. 

This is a well written light cozy with a MC who owns and runs a bookshop in a small tourist town destination full of bookstores and specialty shops. The background is well interwoven in the book, and it works as a standalone without needing to have read the previous books. With so many books extant already in the series, it would make a good choice for a long binge/buddy read.

It's a little longer than most cozies at over 300 pages but the plotting is fairly tight and it doesn't drag. The book is relatively clean, with only a sprinkling of 'hell' and 'damn' and nothing more objectionable in the book than off-page murder, and the requisite threatened violence in the denouement and solution to the murder. Definitely safe for reading at work or on the bus. It's a joke about the death count in the MCs immediate vicinity - she always finds out whodunit, but at this point the sheer statistical impossibility would make her a real life typhoid Mary. (Oh, it's okay Tricia, you don't have to come to the wedding! Just send a card *nervous laughter*). 

Four stars, a fun light cozy mystery. The series will be a hit with fans of "Jessica Fletcher", Ellie Alexander, Cleo Coyle, and Jenn McKinlay.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.