The bride thought they’d live happily ever after — until a murderer struck....
The guests were off the wall. The would-be groom was off the wagon. And the bride certainly wasn’t blushing.
Aside from that, it was the perfect occasion: a party for Hannah Ives’s widowed father and the younger woman he had suddenly decided to marry. Then the evening takes a strange turn, with a sudden death and disappearance.
For Hannah, the stunning turn of events came after a Christmas season slide into anger and confusion. First her father had found a floozy who had already buried three husbands. Then her late mother’s jewelry started showing up around the gold digger’s neck.
Now Hannah, who has just put her life together after a bout with cancer, is desperately searching for her missing father. Because this poor man has either made a terrible mistake, committed a terrible crime, or fallen victim to a killer who seized the moment for murder....
Another holiday cozy mystery. I did enjoy it, despite the 'madcap' characters that came across as annoyingly weird and a mish-mash of subplots that bogged down toward the end of the book. I really got the feeling that the author (who writes quite capably) got tired of trying to move the book along to a successful denouement and just deux-ex-machina'ed an ending on one page. It ended so abruptly that I had to check my kindle to make sure I hadn't missed any pages at the end.
Other reviewers have done a stellar job of explaining the plot without spoilers, so there's nothing else I can add in that capacity which hasn't been covered before (and better) by others.
I will mention that I had not read the first two Hannah Ives mysteries before reading this one and it didn't suffer for that. It was perfectly easy to read as a standalone.
