Monday, October 25, 2021

Murder Outside the Lines

Title: Murder Outside the Lines
Author: Krista Davis
Published: September 28th 2021 by Kensington Publishing Corporation
Format: Kindle, Paperback, 304 pages
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Series: Pen & Ink Mysteries #3

First Sentence: The crate was delivered to Color Me Read around noon on Thursday.

From the Publisher: With Halloween just around the corner, the fall colors in Georgetown are brilliant. As manager of the Color Me Read bookstore, coloring book creator Florrie Fox has arranged for psychic author Hilda Rattenhorst to read from Spooktacular Ghost Stories. But the celebrity medium arrives for the event in hysterics, insisting she just saw a bare foot sticking out of a rolled-up carpet in a nearby alley. Is someone trying to sweep murder under the rug? Florrie calls in her policeman beau, Sergeant Eric Jonquille, but the carpet corpse has disappeared without a trace.

Then in the middle of her reading, Hilda chillingly declares that she feels the killer's presence in the store. Is this a publicity stunt or a genuine psychic episode? It seems there's no happy medium. When a local bibliophile is soon discovered missing, a strange mystery begins to unroll. Now it's up to Florrie and Jonquille to expose a killer's true colors.

My Opinion: You know you are in for a rocky road when the author needs to list a cast of characters, and you, as the read having to remember 23 people and animals and how they are related. Once you get past that, you discover the plot is surprisingly twisty for a cozy mystery.

I can’t say that Florrie is one of my favorite Krista Davis individuals since I tend to be drawn to the quirky Mr. DuBois type, but after three books, she is beginning to grow on me. Maybe it was the Halloween atmosphere or the Georgetown backdrop, but either way, I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed this book.

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