Welcome back to Asheboro, Maryland, where real estate can be a matter of life and death. Killer in the Carriage House is the second book in the Victorian Village Mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Sheila Connolly.Coming back to her hometown was never on the agenda for hotelier Katherine Hamilton. But when she’s offered a chance to lead the charge of transforming the landscape … charge of transforming the landscape into a Victorian village and tourist attraction, Kate can’t quite refuse. The only problem? Nobody in Asheboro has the passion, nor the funds, to get plans off the ground. . .until Kate teams up with handsome historian Joshua Wainwright, who has ambitious ideas of his own involving an old mansion and a treasure-trove of documents that could attract investors and help seal the deal.
Then, just as Kate and Josh seem ready to pull the trigger, a dead body turns up in the town library. Do these mysterious papers spell danger instead of dollars? That’s what Kate intends to find out before all bets are off…and someone else ends up six feet under.
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Killer in the Carriage House is the second book in A Victorian Village Mystery series. It can be read alone for those who are new to this series. Kate Hamilton lost her job when a big conglomerate took over the hotel where she worked. Her friend, Lisbeth Scott asks her to return to Asheboro and come up with a plan to save the dying town. Kate’s idea is to turn the town into a Victorian village after seeing the Henry Barton mansion. However, it will take a massive amount of planning, money and help to pull it off. Money is something that is in short supply after the banker embezzled the town funds. Kate is hoping Henry Barton’s papers will be a help and gets assistance from Josh Wainwright and Carroll Peterson. I like that we are introduced to some of the townspeople like Mayor Skip Bentley, Frances who owns the newspaper, Ted the diner owner, and Mr. MacDonald with his hardware store. Killer in the Carriage House is a slow starter with a sluggish pace. I thought the mystery was light. The dead body is found after I was a quarter of the way through the book and is barely addressed after that point. Identifying the killer is a piece of cake and the resolution was lacking. Kate has great ideas for the town with no idea on how to execute them. She is also a procrastinator. Kate keeps putting off things she needs to accomplish (even going to the grocery store). She should be looking into funding, building codes, talking to towns people and doing research. Instead, Kate devotes her time to the Barton papers. Henry Barton does sound like a fascinating man and I am sure there is more to discover about him. I like the inclusion of Nell Pratt in the story from A Museum Mystery series. A Victorian Village Mystery series is a concept that I think is charming and I enjoyed Murder at the Mansion. Killer in the Carriage House, though, was lacking which is unusual for Sheila Connolly. I am curious to see what Kate and her friends uncover in the next A Victorian Village Mystery.
I really enjoy her books. Characters solve a mystery and learn something about themselves and their relationships.
I love the idea of turning a town into what it looked like in the past. Honestly, though, I wasn’t sure how this series was going to progress after the first book and still stay interesting. I was pleasantly surprised. The premise of Thomas Edison selling his electricity patents and Henry Barton buying them was a joy to read. I’m ashamed to say I have not taken the time to look this up and see if there is a smudge of truth to this or if creative artistic license was used. Either way, it made for interesting reading.
I am eagerly anticipating the third book in this series to see where we go next in the development in the town.
I received a complimentary copy from the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, through NetGalley. Any and all opinions expressed in the above review are entirely my own.
“Killer in the Carriage House” earns 5/5 Document Dilemmas…Engaging Page-Turner!
I am a fan of Sheila Connolly’s writing style from her County Cork and Relatively Dead Mysteries, so I was very eager to read the second book in her Victorian Village Mystery series….I was not disappointed and easily joined in as a newbie to this series. With a first-person narrative, Sheila uses descriptive language and clever banter to illustrate the setting and characters, tone and personalities. The story is quite clever from Kate Hamilton’s perspective as she works to recreate Asheboro, Maryland, into a Victorian Village tourist destination in the effort to save the town from urban extinction. However, the town leaders worry about the expense to renovate, and the discovery of several historical documents may not be enough to help fund their projects. But, then there’s a dead body which doesn’t fit in with their Victorian design! I highly recommend this book!
Killer in the Carriage House is the second book in the Victorian Village Mysteries It can be read as a standalone but would be better after reading the first. The characters are well written and it was a fast paced story. It was a cozy mystery involving the whole town. worth reading.
In this second book of the series Kate has come up with an idea on how to make her hometown a place that people may want to visit. She thinks turning it into a Victorian Village is the way to go and hopes that she will be able to get the whole town involved on making the changes needed for this to happen. The mayor has basically given her the keys to all of the city so that she can do the research she needs in turning the town around. Having found the Barton papers on her return to the town she is hoping that by emptying out the attic of Barton mansion more important papers can be found. They need something big and catchy to help make her ideas for the town take it to another level. While checking out the library to see if they have enough space for the papers to be catalogued there she meets a young man who says he needs to use the library to do some family research. She turns him away because for the moment the library is closed to the public. The next day when returning to the library it looks as if someone has broken in, but she soon realizes that there is a body inside, it turns out to be the young man she met the previous day. With so much on the line with her project for the town a murder isn’t something that she really needs to have to worry with. Follow along as Kate tries to figure out who the young man was, what he was really doing in town, and why someone would want him dead. She needs to find answers so that she can move forward with plans for the town. This was a fun read that had me looking every which way for a killer. I’m enjoying the concept that Kate has for the town and can’t wait to see what all the town will go along with.
Cozy Mystery Full of History
This cozy murder mystery takes place in a small old town in Maryland. It is full of eastern seaboard history circa 1900. The back story is great and very realistic. The murder mystery almost takes a backseat to the historical story. It melds together very well and is a good and fascinating read. This should be a wonderful series. I received this ARC book for free from Net Galley and this is my honest review.
Killer In The Carriage House is the second book in the Victorian Village Mystery series.
Kate Hamilton is still concerned if she can turn her hometown of Asheboro, MD into a Victorian village, in hopes of attracting enough tourists, thereby, preventing the town from becoming a complete ghost town. The finding of letters from Clara Barton to her cousin, Henry Barton an industrialist in Asheboro, is one big step in getting the project headed in the right direction. Kate has contacted her friend in Philadelphia, Nell Pratt, about getting somebody to help sort the remaining items found in the attic of Henry Barton’s mansion. Nell arranges for Carroll Peterson to come help with the sorting.
Kate stops by the library, where she plans to store the papers and where Carroll will be working, to plan where everything will be placed to facilitate the sorting. As she is about to head to the Barton mansion, a young man comes to the door telling Kate that he wants to do some family research. When she explains that the library is closed due to the fact that they are without a librarian, he leaves.
The next day Kate and Carroll arrive at the library to go over where they will store the items and find that a window has been broken and a set of bookshelves has been turned over and under the bookshelves is the body of the young man that Kate had met the day before. The sorting has to be shelved for a couple of days while Detective Reynolds and his crime scene crew search for clues to verify if it was murder or an accident. This gives Kate and Carroll a chance to walk around town, wanting to confirm that will be viable to restore the buildings to their Victorian-era appearance. Also, they are also considering what can be done to restore the building that had housed Barton’s shovel factory. Josh is especially keen on this project. Josh has been acting as a caretaker at the Barton mansion while he is on sabbatical from Johns Hopkins University where his area of specialty is nineteenth-century industrialization studies.
There are two people that arrive in town around the time that the victim had and Kate, Carroll, and Josh all begin to wonder whether this is a coincidence or not. The first is Alison. Josh is acquainted with Alison having met her at a few conferences they both had attended. Alison claims to be researching urban history and needs Josh’s help with this. The other is Eric, who is a college friend of Ryan and claims to be interested in the Civil War and is visiting various battle sites in the area.
Hopefully, they will be able to find the killer before any more deaths occur and Kate will be able to get the citizens to embrace her project and contribute their own or their families memories when it was a viable community. Kate visited the publisher of the newspaper, Frances, and found an interesting article that may solve many mysteries if they can only find the original papers before anyone else does.
I found this book to be a very well-written and interesting story and very interesting and believable characters. There were enough red herrings that I was kept guessing until the end of the book.
I am anxiously awaiting the next book in this great series.
I can hardly believe that this is only the second book in the series. The first book, Murder At The Mansion, did such a phenomenal job of setting up the characters and the backstory that you feel as if, in this book, you are coming home and visiting with old friends and places. The overarching background story concerns Asheboro, Maryland – a very small town that has gotten lost in the migration to larger cities. The only industry has closed down and the younger people are all moving to the larger cities for work. This leaves the town with few residents and no money to sustain itself. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to save the town, they are looking are re-making the town into a Victorian Village in the vein of colonial Williamsburg, VA.
Kate Hamilton is busily trying to figure out how to convince the town merchants to rip out all of the modernization in their storefronts and change them back to their original Victorian configuration. Most of the changes from the last hundred years has been superficial and left the original structures intact. She also needs to find another tourist draw to the village and is hoping to find that in the remainder of the Henry Barton papers. In the last book, they found valuable and historic letters to Henry from Clara Barton, but that won’t be enough to draw tourists to their town. So, they are hoping that there will be additional historical documents of significance in Henry’s papers. Those things are very, very important because the town doesn’t have the money for any of the projects and if something of importance and value isn’t found, the town will just wither and die. So Kate has her hands full.
As Kate, Josh and Carroll ready the documents from the Barton mansion to the town library, Kate has a young man drop in at the closed library asking to visit the family section of the library. Kate tells him that the library is temporarily closed because they don’t have a librarian and that he’ll have to ask permission from the town leaders before he can come in. The young man leaves and Kate soon locks up and leaves the library. When she returns the following day with her friend Carroll, it is to discover the body of the young man who had just visited the day before.
Kate calls Detective Reynolds of the State Police and tells him what has happened. Nobody knows who the young man is – and his death wasn’t natural or accidental. Kate and company try to leave the murder investigation to Detective Reynolds while they focus on the documents – but – things keep happening that lead them to believe that the murder is somehow associated with the documents and they begin to wonder if there aren’t more documents stored somewhere else. What other secrets could there be? Is there something that would garner the town the money it needs to save itself? What was the young man looking for? Who could have killed him and why?
This is a fun read with excellent mysteries – murder and other. I also liked the introduction of the historical and research information included because it made the scenarios very believable. All-in-all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I can’t wait for the next book.
I’ve read other series by the author and she seems to bring any romance elements into it very slowly – much to my dismay. I love a good mystery, but it also needs to have a good, strong romance element in it for me. So far, the romance in this series is tenuous and I’m getting antsy about it. Is Josh the one? The real, strong connection doesn’t seem to be there so far. Is it Ryan? Unlikely, but possible. Someone else? Who knows. I’m ready for it to be settled.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.