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Murder Is Binding
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List Price: $6.99
Our Price: $6.99
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Berkley
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780425219584
ISBN: 0425219585
Label: Berkley
Manufacturer: Berkley
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Publisher: Berkley
Studio: Berkley
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Editorial Reviews:
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The streets of Stoneham, New Hampsire are lined with bookstores...and paved with murder.
When she moved to Stoneham, city slicker Tricia Miles met nothing but friendly faces. And when she opened her mystery bookstore, she met friendly competition. But when she finds Doris Gleason dead in her own cookbook store, killed by a carving knife, the atmosphere seems more cutthroat than cordial. Someone wanted to get their hands on the rare cookbook that Doris had recently purchased-and the locals think that someone is Tricia. To clear her name, Tricia will have to take a page out of one of her own mysteries-and hunt down someone who isn't killing by the book.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: fun New England cozy mystery
Comment: Stoneham, New Hampshire, is experiencing a bit of a Renaissance, what with all the new bookstores brought into downtown by the Chamber of Commerce, and Tricia Miles, owner of the store dedicated to mysteries, is having a grand old time until the unpleasant cookbook store owner is found dead -- by Tricia. When she becomes the number one suspect, Tricia decides to use her mystery skills to clear her name, which is seeming more difficult all the time, particularly when Tricia's annoying sister drops in for an unexpected visit.
As mysteries go, this is not a very compelling read, but the characters are fun and Barrett is a fine writer. I would read others in the series, watching for a better mystery.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stoneham, NJ
Comment: This is my first Lorna Barrett book. I enjoyed the read and the recipes. However I was somewhat disappointed with the mystery. It was just a little too simple for my taste.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Book i have read in a long time!
Comment: This book was amazing! Whoever wrote that it didn't hold their interest obviously didn't read this book. It was so good I read it in about an hour. I highly recommend it and can't wait for the next in the series!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A bit of throat clearing before getting down to business
Comment: Oh, gee, just what we all need, a cozy mystery about a woman who runs a smalltown bookstore that sells only mysteries! Perhaps now we can look forward to a new series of books about a young woman in, say, New Jersey who takes up bounty hunting, or maybe another one about a woman in Southern California who operates a small-time detective agency. (Hm ... here's an idea: one might have titles that progress through the alphabet while the other uses numbers.)
This first book of a proposed new series is all about setting the scene, introducing characters and establishing relationships. By the standards of detective fiction, the mystery element of "Murder is Binding" is rather anemic, although perhaps a bit closer to crimes in real life. After all, the master criminals who use elaborate, diabolical plots and exotic, untraceable poisons must be few and far between compared to the simple, untaught toilers who simply bash their victims over the head in commonplace back alleys.
Some Amazon reviewers, I see, dislike the author's word-smithing--her style, her punctuation, that sort of thing. And, yes, this book is a bit more crude than many exemplars of the cozy mystery. On the other hand, how many times have we seen writers heap praise to the highest heavens upon their editors for helping to shape their works? I see no reason why some honest, hard-working and, needless to say, underpaid editorial drudge should not pull up his or her sleeves to put in some real work on the second volume of this series.
(This type of aid is by no means limited to cozy mysteries. There is something truly epic about the way Maxwell Perkins, greatest of all American editors, carved minor masterpieces out of the endless reams of glop submitted by Thomas Wolfe. And no doubt, unless the author burns it all first, some other editor is going to do the same thing for the enormous but still unpublished output of a famously reclusive writer when he finally catches his last in the rye.)
"Murder is Binding" isn't much as it stands, but it may yet prove to hold potential as the author expands both the series and herself as a writer.
I think this is a three-star book, but I look forward to volume two of the series with a certain amount of hope.
LEC/AM/11-08
Customer Rating:
Summary: Murder Is Binding
Comment: I read a lot of mysteries, and this one had its moments, but didn't keep me hooked. I think Lorna Barrett has a lot of potential, though, and I would try another of her mysteries.
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