A Motive for Murder by Morgana BestMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A Motive for Murder (A Misty Sales Paranormal Cozy Mystery, book 1)by Morgana Best
Just coming out of the epic Baskerville Affair Series by Emma Jane Holloway and Heading into the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein I was looking for something a bit lighter to help keep my head from exploding with an overload of epic fantasy. This Cozy Mystery turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.
Misty Sales is a writer for a paranormal magazine based in Australia. It's not her first choice in jobs in that profession, but her private life intersected too closely with her professional and left her momentarily adrift from her dream job. When her Aunt Beth in England, who is growing old and frail, sends her a somewhat strange letter asking her to come to England to see her and collect some keepsakes, her initial reaction is to set it aside. But curiously such a trip coincides with a piece she is currently working on and she would just have to convince her boss to make this a business trip so she might be able to afford it.
Misty arrives too late and finds her Aunt has passed away; possibly the day before she arrived and Misty is just in time to be knocked down by a gentleman who seems to be fleeing from her Aunt’s house. As things unfold Misty begins to have suspicions about her Aunt’s death; but that suspicion comes after her initial reaction to call for help leads to a doctor who comes to quickly sign this off as natural causes and who promptly sends the funeral directors out to whisk the corpse away and leave Misty with an empty house with two rooms that might be ransacked, an elderly neighbor claiming to be a good friend of her aunt, a cat that likes to claw at her and the mysterious lingering smell of garlic that was hanging in the air around her deceased aunt.
A prior experience of my own clued me to a possible cause of death and I'll leave that for the next reader to figure out.
As it is: it seems that Misty's aunt had intentions of passing her more than just keepsakes and memorabilia; but before that comes to light Misty has to solve a number of mysteries. And as with many mysteries the reader meets all the suspects, with various clues, yet not quite enough information to fill in most of the blanks. And much the same as my old favorite Alfred Hitchcock-Cary Grant movie 'North by Northwest'; by the time the reader reaches the more dramatic parts Misty doesn't know who to trust anymore.
Excellently written cozy mystery; but don't take my word for it, because I'm new to this genre and had to look it up. There were a few sentences that might have drifted into colloquialisms that had me stopping to read them several times over to makes sure I had a grasp of what they might be trying to tell me; but otherwise it's a well written story and was the right diversion I needed to clear my mind. There were a number of jarring current pop references; but that might be something I'm over sensitive about.
J.L. Dobias
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