Thursday, June 8, 2017

A Bitter Harvest

Title: A Bitter Harvest
Author: Wendy Tyson
Published: March 7th 2017 by Henery Press
Format: Kindle Edition, 272 pages
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Series: Greenhouse Mysteries #2

Rural Winsome, located in Eastern Pennsylvania, is preparing for their first Oktoberfest, not all participants are happy about which farm, and more importantly, which craft brewery will be showcased. It is not that this is a competitive thing among the residents, unfortunately, it is more along the lines of favors and who knows whom that has some upset. Things ramp up quickly when first one and then a second body is discovered. Who is behind this and why has Megan Sawyer found an old battered Adirondack chair on Potter Hill angled to watch her property?

Megan is the owner of the Washington Acres Café and Larder in addition to an organic farm, where she lives with her grandmother Bibi, and in the last book, the reader found out that there might be some hidden items of interest located on the property.

With Oktoberfest gearing up and the expected influx of thousands of people over the next week, Megan and the local police chief need to answer a few questions quickly and it is not just about the dead men, but there are other oddities as well, that are confounding them. Dealing with the “human foibles of greed, lust and jealousy” this is a twisty story that had me on a number of occasions going back a bit to remind myself who was who and who was related and who was dating and who was an employee and who was dead. By the end, the dots were connected but not before I was completely confused and wondered what Wendy Tyson’s storyboard must have looked like with dozens of pushpins and connecting strings pointing in multiple directions.

As the book says, “a bunch of disparate facts and no cohesive theory” not only tells of the murders in Winsome, but also perfectly describes this book considering the ulterior motives behind the slayings came completely out of left field.

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