It’s a case of cold feet—and cold-blooded murder—as 92-year-old poet/sleuth Victoria Trumbull gets more than she bargained for after hosting an ill-fated wedding.A wedding on picturesque Martha’s Vineyard promises to be the affair of the season when Penny Arbuthnot asks her cousin, feisty 92-year-old poet Victoria Trumbull, if she can use her property for the reception. Victoria agrees—but she … Victoria agrees—but she has no idea what’s in store for the hapless couple.
For one, Penny is seriously in debt and desperate to marry money. She thinks she’s on the road to riches when she hooks Rocco Bufano, whose father is a multi-billionaire. But unbeknownst to Penny, Rocco’s been disowned by dad. He’s also in hock up to his ears, and thinks he’s bagged the catch of a lifetime in a wealthy Vineyard native. He also knows that someone is out to kill him. In fact, several guests have a reason to off Rocco, among them an autistic savant with a prodigious knowledge of murder weapons.
Victoria has assumed the reception will be a modest lemonade-and-gingersnap affair—but when a body is found in her cellar, it may be a happily-never-after in Widow’s Wreath, the fourteenth engaging installment in Cynthia Riggs’s beloved Martha’s Vineyard mysteries.
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A murder mystery where the groom is so horrid everyone wants to kill him. This is a fun read about two greedy and very poor people thinking the other is rich and determining to marry one another. Penny is penniless (I could not resist writing that) and her soon to be betrothed, Rocco, has been cut off by his father. They just don’t quite know it yet. The joke is on both of them but only one is the nasty, selfish, self-centered person almost everyone on the island wants to do away with. It seems the wedding is planned and everyone begins to show up at the house of Penny’s elderly, sweet, very wise cousin, Victoria Trumbull.
There were a lot of characters in this story and sometimes that can confuse the storyline or the reader for that matter. This didn’t seem to be the case with Rigg’s story. Each character had a very distinct personality making it easy to keep track of who was who so to speak. The same is true of the description of Victoria Trumbull’s beautiful home. I wanted to visit it. As I said, I enjoyed this story and it kept me interested enough to keep the pages turning fairly fast.
This is book 14 of a series titled “Martha’s Vinyard Mysteries”. They seem to all have good reviews so should be worth the time checking out.
**This book was provided to me free of charge in exchange for an honest review.
Widow’s Wreath is the fourteenth book in the Martha’s Vineyard Mystery series.
I’ve enjoyed the other books in this series, but this one not as much. For me, there were too many suspects introduced early on in the book and it seems to take a while to learn that the wrong person had been killed. It took me a while to get everybody straight and their reasons for wanting the same person dead.
Victoria Trumball has agreed to host her 25-year-old distant cousin’s, Penny, wedding to Rocco Bufano. An electrician, Mark Johnson comes to Victoria’s home to upgrade the wiring that will be needed to support the need of additional electricity for the reception. Johnson soon asks Victoria what he should do with the scarecrow hanging in the basement. He soon learns that it is no scarecrow but in fact the body of a man that has been strangled.
Victoria wonders whether this was a good idea when she also learns that Penny has gone deeply into debt to fund the wedding and reception. The wedding, as it turns out, is a matter of convenience. Both of them think the other is rich and their answer to pay off their debts. The police are having difficulty identifying the body, but they feel that Rocco is not being completely honest when asked to identify the body. It seems that just about all of the guests and even the wedding party end up coming under suspicion. It will become clear that Rocco is the intended victim and the police will need to find the killer before someone else is murdered.
This is a well developed and interesting story with many interesting and believable characters. I would like to see future books to more like the earlier books.
I will be watching for future books in this entertaining series.