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A review by candidceillie
Candy Corn Murder by Leslie Meier
3.0
Halloween is coming to Tinker’s Cove, Maine, and local reporter Lucy Stone is covering the town’s annual Giant Pumpkin Fest for The Pennysaver. There’s the pumpkin-boat regatta, the children’s Halloween party, the pumpkin weigh-in…even a contest where home-built catapults hurl pumpkins at an old Dodge! But not everything goes quite as planned…
Lucy’s getting very annoyed that her husband Bill and his friend Evan have been working seemingly nonstop on their potentially prize-winning pumpkin catapult. But when the day of the big contest arrives, Evan is nowhere to be found…until a catapulted pumpkin busts open the trunk of the Dodge. Amid the pumpkin gore is a very deceased Evan, bashed in the head and placed in the trunk by someone long before the contest started.
Bill is on the hook for the Halloween homicide—he was the last one to see Evan—so Lucy knows she’s got some serious sleuthing to do. The crime’s trail seems to always circle back to Country Cousins, the town’s once-quaint general store that’s now become a big Internet player. Though the store’s founder, Old Sam Miller, is long gone, his son Tom and grandson Trey now run the hugely successful company. But whispered rumors say things aren’t going well, and Lucy finds that this case may have something to do with an unsolved, decades-old Miller family mystery…
With each new lead pointing her in a different direction, Lucy sees that time is quickly running out. If she wants to spook the real killer, she’ll have to step into an old ghost story…
Candy Corn Murder is the 22nd novel in the Lucy Stone Mystery series by Leslie Meier, but it really didn’t feel like a novel that deep into a series. I have never read any of the other Lucy Stone novels, but this book spent almost the first half of the story telling us how life in their small town was lived, which I feel like should have been covered in the other novels, so there wasn’t so much of an info dump in this one.
I had several problems with this novel that led me to almost quit reading several times. My first problem was that the “old ghost story” mentioned in the summary was totally given away in the first chapter, and as soon as you meet the murderer, it’s really obvious. This made the second mystery significantly less of a mystery. My second main problem was that almost every single one of the secondary characters was two-dimensional - Lucy’s daughter was a feminist with bad taste in men, “Ev” was a smelly mooch, Corny was very into attractive men, and all of her neighbors had their own small part to play. The teacher was shrewish and new-age-y, Lucy’s boss at The Pennysaver was only dedicated to a good story, not to anyone’s feelings, etc. This bugged me to no end, because I could always tell what was going to happen when she spoke to any of her coworkers or friends about anything.
The only thing that really kept me reading through this novel (other than my Goodreads reading challenge that I am woefully behind on) was the theme of helping people get away from situations of domestic abuse. Other than that, I really did not care for this novel, which is why I’ve rated it 2 stars.
Lucy’s getting very annoyed that her husband Bill and his friend Evan have been working seemingly nonstop on their potentially prize-winning pumpkin catapult. But when the day of the big contest arrives, Evan is nowhere to be found…until a catapulted pumpkin busts open the trunk of the Dodge. Amid the pumpkin gore is a very deceased Evan, bashed in the head and placed in the trunk by someone long before the contest started.
Bill is on the hook for the Halloween homicide—he was the last one to see Evan—so Lucy knows she’s got some serious sleuthing to do. The crime’s trail seems to always circle back to Country Cousins, the town’s once-quaint general store that’s now become a big Internet player. Though the store’s founder, Old Sam Miller, is long gone, his son Tom and grandson Trey now run the hugely successful company. But whispered rumors say things aren’t going well, and Lucy finds that this case may have something to do with an unsolved, decades-old Miller family mystery…
With each new lead pointing her in a different direction, Lucy sees that time is quickly running out. If she wants to spook the real killer, she’ll have to step into an old ghost story…
Candy Corn Murder is the 22nd novel in the Lucy Stone Mystery series by Leslie Meier, but it really didn’t feel like a novel that deep into a series. I have never read any of the other Lucy Stone novels, but this book spent almost the first half of the story telling us how life in their small town was lived, which I feel like should have been covered in the other novels, so there wasn’t so much of an info dump in this one.
I had several problems with this novel that led me to almost quit reading several times. My first problem was that the “old ghost story” mentioned in the summary was totally given away in the first chapter, and as soon as you meet the murderer, it’s really obvious. This made the second mystery significantly less of a mystery. My second main problem was that almost every single one of the secondary characters was two-dimensional - Lucy’s daughter was a feminist with bad taste in men, “Ev” was a smelly mooch, Corny was very into attractive men, and all of her neighbors had their own small part to play. The teacher was shrewish and new-age-y, Lucy’s boss at The Pennysaver was only dedicated to a good story, not to anyone’s feelings, etc. This bugged me to no end, because I could always tell what was going to happen when she spoke to any of her coworkers or friends about anything.
The only thing that really kept me reading through this novel (other than my Goodreads reading challenge that I am woefully behind on) was the theme of helping people get away from situations of domestic abuse. Other than that, I really did not care for this novel, which is why I’ve rated it 2 stars.