Tessa Schmidt was floating through life after losing her husband Peter in a car accident until her parents convinced her to return to her hometown of Shady Lake. Moving back to the small town in Minnesota where she grew up provides a welcome retreat as she helps run the B&B where her parents live while hanging out at her best friend Mandy’s donut shop. She has even started to go out on a few … few dates, mostly with her high school boyfriend, Max and the new teacher in town, Clark.
With the annual Halloween Hayride coming up, Tessa is excited to be part of the committee that runs the town’s largest fundraiser. Everything is going great, until Earl Stone tries to personally profit from it.
As everyone tries to make sure the Hayride is on track, Tessa finds something that really might shut it down for good: someone murdered Earl in the field where the Hayride takes place. And they did it by running him over with the Halloween Hayride!
Can Tessa figure out who killed Earl and get the Halloween Hayride back on track before it’s too late?
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Tessa moved back home to her small Minnesota town when her husband was killed in an accident. Now she’s a young widow who works at her parents’ B&B. She’s also joined the Halloween Hayride committee, glad to be part of the community again. But one morning when the committee is meeting, a strange man enters and makes demands of them or he’ll shut it down. Tessa later learns that Earl inherited everything from his late uncle, and wants to charge them an exorbitant fee to use the land for the hayride, that they’ve used forever for free.
When Tessa and her friend Clark go to the shed where the tractor is kept, it’s missing. They soon discover that someone has used it to run over Earl, and now the police are looking for someone with a motive — like the mayor. Tessa takes it upon herself to find out who killed Earl, but he wasn’t well-liked in the community. With too many suspects and too many motives, she needs to find a killer who just might be someone she never expected…
I love ‘reading the season,’ and since Halloween isn’t too far away, I thought I would start with this book, since it sounded promising. Soon enough I discovered that it wasn’t. Tessa, who only lost her husband a little over a year ago, is now making goo-goo eyes at two bachelors in town: Clark, a high school teacher; and her ex-boyfriend Max, who’s a police officer. She’s “casually dating” them both, meaning they can see other people and so can she. As she reminds us often (too often), it’s ‘just fun and games’. But they both pretty much make her knees weak, and I find that odd since her husband hasn’t been gone that long and she professes her grief for him often, too. Not that I’m saying people shouldn’t move on. But it’s one thing to profess grief and another in the next sentence for two men to make you all giggly like a teenager.
Unfortunately, I also abhor love triangles. So much so I avoid them if possible. Then there’s the idea of ‘couples costumes’ which inhabits her mind, and which I found odd, since it seemed a big decision of which ‘boy’ to go to the festival with based on a costume. (Tessa also ate a lot of donuts, stressed or not. Her body and skin must love her for it.)
There was a lot of repetition. So, so much. Like how much she loved her husband. How she is only casually dating these two men. We get it. You don’t want a commitment and neither do they, but we don’t need to be told that constantly. It was taking away from the mystery portion of the book, and it was almost as if Tessa was trying to convince herself that she was still mourning her husband. Sorry, but that’s just how I saw it.
I really do love to try new authors, but this book got on my last nerve, and I just wanted it to end. When the ending comes and the killer is revealed, I didn’t find it too believable at all; and I wish I did. I hate dinging new authors, and because of that, I will read the next in the series and see if it improves. Hopefully, the characters will have some depth by then. Sorry.
Tessa is struggling after her husband dies. Her parents convincer to come home to a small town in Minnesota. Things begin to improve until a death threatens to ruin the town’s Halloween party plans.
This is the first book in the cozy mystery series, Small Town Minnesota. It is a fun read with lots of quirky characters and small town charm. The storyline was logical and smoothly done filled with mystery and some romance. The mystery has numerous suspects, subtle clues and suspense. If you enjoy reading fun cozy small town mysteries, you will enjoy this one.