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A review by expendablemudge
Six Geese A-Slaying by Donna Andrews
4.0
Rating: 4* of five
This delicious romp is part of a daffy mystery series featuring the Rubenesque Meg Langslow, daughter of a chic, slim, stylish and scary Virginia aristocrat mother and a simple, single-minded doctor father who never grew up (thank goodness). She's married to an ex-soap hunk and cult TV fantasy villain actor-turned-drama-professor at a small, exclusive liberal arts college located a few miles from her hometown of Yorktown, Virginia. Her extensive extended family includes a cousin who lives his life as a forensic technician from inside a gorillla suit; a cousin whose wool-headed New Age philosophical maunderings cause most of the family acute embarrassment; a younger brother who, like her father, never grew up but managed to make himself rich by starting a MMO-RPG company.
Getting the picture? It's a screwball comedy-cum-mystery, with a couple of befuddled normals at its whirling center. Think "Bringing Up Baby"--you know, the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie with the leopard and the madcap heiress?--and you've got the gist. And it's working for Andrews! This is the ninth of ten, to date, books in the series.
I commented once, on an LT thread now long buried, that I read mysteries to satisfy my orderly side. (The Divine Miss contends I *have* no orderly side, usually with a wrinkled nose and a wince as she looks into my bedroom.) This series of mysteries, despite the winsome chaos of the plot, scratches that bump with just the right touch. I love the characters, I willingly believe that (fictional) Caerphilly County, Virginia, is run by the lunatics instead of the asylum attendants, because *things go right* there. The right people are rewarded and punished. The right solutions are found to problems, and are implemented with a nudge and a wink at the law.
It's the way I wish Nassau County, New York, was run. It ain't, for the record, even close.
So when the chance came to join the Holiday (not Christmas!) parade and festivities in Caerphilly, Virginia, it would have taken a stronger man than I am to resist the siren call. I read the book in about four hours of snorting, giggling, howling fun. And that's the downside of Andrews's simple, direct prose: It flows like water over the eyeballs, nothing to impede the story being told, no snaggle in the current, just fast-flowing water from the Holy Well of Humor.
The humorless need not even bother looking at the book. The po-faced classics snobs should pass by the shelf, wincing disdainfully. The pseudo-erudite high-culture vultures stand warned off. The rest of us will be over here, in the corner, laughing fit to bust.
This delicious romp is part of a daffy mystery series featuring the Rubenesque Meg Langslow, daughter of a chic, slim, stylish and scary Virginia aristocrat mother and a simple, single-minded doctor father who never grew up (thank goodness). She's married to an ex-soap hunk and cult TV fantasy villain actor-turned-drama-professor at a small, exclusive liberal arts college located a few miles from her hometown of Yorktown, Virginia. Her extensive extended family includes a cousin who lives his life as a forensic technician from inside a gorillla suit; a cousin whose wool-headed New Age philosophical maunderings cause most of the family acute embarrassment; a younger brother who, like her father, never grew up but managed to make himself rich by starting a MMO-RPG company.
Getting the picture? It's a screwball comedy-cum-mystery, with a couple of befuddled normals at its whirling center. Think "Bringing Up Baby"--you know, the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie with the leopard and the madcap heiress?--and you've got the gist. And it's working for Andrews! This is the ninth of ten, to date, books in the series.
I commented once, on an LT thread now long buried, that I read mysteries to satisfy my orderly side. (The Divine Miss contends I *have* no orderly side, usually with a wrinkled nose and a wince as she looks into my bedroom.) This series of mysteries, despite the winsome chaos of the plot, scratches that bump with just the right touch. I love the characters, I willingly believe that (fictional) Caerphilly County, Virginia, is run by the lunatics instead of the asylum attendants, because *things go right* there. The right people are rewarded and punished. The right solutions are found to problems, and are implemented with a nudge and a wink at the law.
It's the way I wish Nassau County, New York, was run. It ain't, for the record, even close.
So when the chance came to join the Holiday (not Christmas!) parade and festivities in Caerphilly, Virginia, it would have taken a stronger man than I am to resist the siren call. I read the book in about four hours of snorting, giggling, howling fun. And that's the downside of Andrews's simple, direct prose: It flows like water over the eyeballs, nothing to impede the story being told, no snaggle in the current, just fast-flowing water from the Holy Well of Humor.
The humorless need not even bother looking at the book. The po-faced classics snobs should pass by the shelf, wincing disdainfully. The pseudo-erudite high-culture vultures stand warned off. The rest of us will be over here, in the corner, laughing fit to bust.