This is the 4th in Sheila Connolly's Orchard Mystery series. It's my favorite so far. Meg's mother Elizabeth comes to visit an old friend, a college professor whose specialty is the poetry of Emily Dickinson. When the professor turns up dead in a nearby cider mill Elizabeth is suspected of killin...
Sheila Connolly never disappoints. She melts together a great mystery with a better than average posse of friends and neighbours plus just enough sizzle in the romance part of her tale. This one kept me guessing and on my toes in a slightly creepy way - found myself thinking about who might be ...
This was just a really bad book. I have enjoyed most of the series, but this book took the entire series down to a new low. Unlikable characters abound in this mess. The murderer was apparent from the first two chapters. After thinking about it, I realized that Ms. Connolly is really lacking in t...
I didn't get to read this book when it first came out. I wasn't able to acquire it from any of my usual sources. I'm so glad that I found it in one of my local libraries. I love the series and it is fantastic how Nell is growing as a person, a leader, and a main character... Jimmy sure doesn't h...
That thought slammed into Maura’s head when she woke up Monday morning after a short and restless night. She lay in bed worrying while the sun came up. Why had Aidan Crowley died at Sullivan’s? Was it going to affect her business? It seemed kind of heartless to worry about that, but she couldn’t ...
“Okay, let’s see if I’ve got this right,” Maura said. “You think this little painting you saw in New Jersey might be connected to a bigger one by the same important artist, and that one might be in Ireland, if it exists at all. In fact, you think it’s somewhere near here, which is why you’re here...
She had to stop and count how long she’d been in Ireland: this was only her fifth day here, if she counted the day she’d arrived. It seemed like longer. She had to admit, she felt like she’d been thrown into the deep end of the pool, with no warning. As she’d told Mick, everybody around here seem...
“What? About Ellie?”Abby nodded. “Remember that Leslie asked me to entertain her one day last week? That was the first time I met her. She’s seen everything in the museum, so I volunteered to take her for a walk. She asked if we could go to the cemetery down the street there. You know I like ceme...
Lydia Chapin happily accepted the offer of a ride to Amherst, where Rachel and her husband ran a bed-and-breakfast. At least during normal times: Rachel’s unexpected pregnancy, ten years after the birth of her son Matthew, had kind of put that on hold. Luckily her husband Noah’s schedule gave him...
So much for my getting anything done this morning. “Hi, stranger!” I greeted her. “I haven’t seen much of you lately.” Marty dropped into a chair in front of my desk. To my eye she was looking a bit sleeker than I’d seen her before. “I’ve been, uh, ...
I should strike while the iron was hot, which translated to, find out now whether this idea has any chance of working, sooner rather than later, before I and other people devoted a lot of time to it. Speaking with Tyrone was a good place to start, if he was up to it—after all, he’d been shot just...
Ned asked as he dressed the next morning.“I’m not there to buy, just to pump people for information.”“What if it turns out they have a family Bible going back to 1683 and think it’s just a musty old book?”Did that really ever happen? “Fine, I’ll take cash. At least the place should be easy to fin...
He held it open for Marty, and I followed her in. She’d been inside the house once or twice before, but never for more than a few minutes since we’d moved in. That would made her our first official guest, not that we’d invited her or anything. “Love what you’ve done with t...
Pickers came and went, bringing boxes, shifting things around in the barn—doing almost anything but actually picking. Meg was becoming accustomed to the sound of voices outside the house at odd hours, but there was no rushing the apples. Monday morning she woke with a start and realized she hadn’...
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Meg asked Gail, as Gail led her around the room, pointing out changes. “By the way, how many people are on it?” “There’s the president, the vice president, the secretary, the treasurer, and four additional trustees. You’ve probably met them all at one time or another.” &nb...
At first, the cast at the large table at the head of the room had been enjoying a meal just like most of us, but at some point they started speaking more loudly and more clearly, and the rest of us slowly realized that something was happening and maybe we should pay attention. The general din in ...
Part of that was due to the rain, now falling nearly sideways, pushed by the strong wind—straight into her front windows. Maura kept the fire going in Sullivan’s, but peat was slow to burn and didn’t provide much warmth, so it was fighting a losing battle against the dark and damp. &n...
Meg parked at the side of the house, pausing to admire its frilly gingerbread and warmly glowing windows, and went around to the kitchen door, which was unlocked. Rachel wouldn’t have heard anything as quiet as a knock, immersed as she was with marshaling her two children to clean up the kitchen ...
No one complained. It was an odd meal, Meg reflected, watching her family eat. Back in the day there had been a rule in the household that one did not discuss anything at the dinner table that might upset one’s digestion. Murder would certainly be on that list, not that it had ever been a remote ...
Abby woke up early but groggy and realized that she had to meet Leslie and Ellie in Concord in less than two hours. It hardly seemed fair to Ellie, to offer her only a befuddled Abby at half strength, but she wasn’t about to cancel. She slid carefully out of bed, trying not to wake Ned, and padde...
Nothing had improved since the day before: the house smelled damp and musty. In fact, yesterday she hadn’t even noticed the trail of muddy footprints that the various representatives of the law had added to her less-than-pristine kitchen floor. And she wasn’t sure if she could run any water, or i...
But I don’t think she would have chosen it as a skin color. Edith lay on her back in a drift of snow, some old, some newly fallen, looking as though she was taking a nap—except her eyes were half-open, and so was her mouth. There were snowflakes on ...
When the police arrived, they found a scene unlike any the Water Works had ever known: An FBI agent covered in blood, some of which was spreading at a horrifying rate over the marble steps, with the president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society trying to stop the flow bare-handed—unsuccessful...