Anne Perry Guest

Guest

Anne Perry

Ballantine, Nov 2005, $16.95, 193 pp.

ISBN: 0345483804

Since her granddaughter Emily and her husband are going to France for the Christmas Holidays, Grandmama Ellison is being shipped off to the home of her daughter-in-law Caroline. She doesn't want to go because after Grandmama's son died, Caroline married a man years younger than her who is a Jewish actor. Since she has no place else to stay, she travels to Caroline's place and makes sure Caroline and her husband knows she is very unhappy. Her displeasure increases tenfold when Joshua's relatives send their sister Maude, who has been out of the country for forty years, to stay with them because they claim they have company and there is no room for her.

Maude and Grandmama are thrown together constantly, and it is only when Maude dies in her sleep does Grandmama realise how much she had grown to like her. The death was sudden and the empty bottle of peppermint syrup near Maude's bad makes Grandmama believe there was poison in the bottle given to the deceased. Grandmama starts snooping around trying to figure out if Maude was indeed murdered, and if so, who hated her enough to kill her.

Anne Perry's Christmas tale carries quite a punch as Grandmama, a woman who out scrooges Scrooge, comes to realize through knowing Maude, that a person can change for the better if they want to. Grandmama, the grandmother of Charlotte Pitt, discovers that seeking a killer leads her to examining her own behavior, and that she needs to change. This is as much a character study as it is a mystery, and readers will find it a very entertaining and special treat.

Harriet Klausner