The 4th book in Donald Bain & Jessica Fletcher's "Murder, She Wrote" series, "Brandy & Bullets" deals with the Worrell mansion a local landmark that every 5 years with the assistance of the family trust has a change in direction or continued direction attached to it. When the final family member, Jacob Worrell decides to sell the property to the Corcoran Group & turn it into an institute for cretive learning, the town of Cabot Cove gets suspicious although Jessica Fletcher supports the idea. All seems relatively fine until one of the visitors, Maureen Beaumont turns up dead of an apparent suicide. From there Jessica & the usual cast of characters go into full mystery mode trying to figure out what caused her death & an eventual disappearance of a close friend."Brandy & Bullets" is written almost as a frame story around an actual book that our fictional heroine is writing with strong enough characters to build off of & a twist in the book that seems comes so far from left field (even for this series) that it seems unbelievable. Everything does get solved & the ending itself just seems a bit off once we the reader get into the institute's real purpose. There's also a lot of jumping forward in time so the book takes place across quite a few months which really isn't all that necessary to progress the storyline. Overall a decent entry into this series with an ending that is a disappointment to this reader simply because of the way it was handled.
Overall, I enjoyed Brandy & Bullets. It was interesting to read the first Bain novel to be set in Cabot Cove, and see how it has developed over the course of the book series. One thing, for example, is the change of mayor - in this book, it is a woman named Sybil Stewart, but for the remainder of the series, it is the loveable Jim Shevlin. As I am from London, England, and I have never been to the US, it was interesting to read how smalltown Maine life works and revolves. I did feel at times
What do You think about Brandy And Bullets (1995)?
This book had a great mystery that was ingaging and intresting and VERY well written. The twist at the end Ididn't see coming, but who the killer was I barcially got. But there were a couple things I found fault with that got this book 4 stars instead of 5 stars, first off was the fact that the Cabot Covers are protrayed as small minded, hateful, and bigotted people. The Jessica wasn't ateacher, in the tv series was a teacher in Cabot Cove Highschool for year. Mort wasn't married and that he was from New England when he was married when he came to Cabot Cove from New York City. But overall it was a good book with a great story that I greatly enjoyed and the flaws were only minor drawbacks to me.
—Brit
I liked this book better than the previous one in the series, probably because it takes place in Cabot Cove with the characters I came to love in the TV series.I will agree with whoever said in their critique that Donald Bain seems not to have watched the series because there are some inconsistencies. There's no mention of Adele, so Mort appears to not be married in this book. And it was really jarring for Jessica to be nervous about teaching a seminar since she is a retired teacher. But these discrepancies weren't deal-killers for me. Just as I've gotten used to movies being different from the books, I can accept that these books are different from the television series.
—Elise M.
