Denise Swanson Murder of a Smart Cookie

Murder of a Smart Cookie

Denise Swanson

After being dumped by her boyfriend and losing her job and apartment, Skye Denison returns home to Scumble River, Illinois where she becomes district school psychologist. She needs a job when school is out especially so because she wants to buy her cottage. She becomes a salesclerk in Cookie's Collectibles but when she sees Cookie trying to cheat eighty-nine year old Alma Griggs out of a vase worth thousands of dollars, Skye tells Alma not to sell it. Cookie fires Sky who gets a job with the Mayor her Uncle Dante pulling together the First Annual Route 66 yard sale.

She rents her home to Faith Easton, the star of TV show Faith Finds, who is coming to televise the miles long flea market. Everything is going well for Skye who has no trouble coordinating the event until her mother and grandmother find Cookie's murdered body in the liquor cabinet they are using to store stuff for the yard sale. Shortly thereafter, Sky and her mother find Alma's body in the trellis on her home, a sword in her body. The sheriff thinks Skye and her mother are viable suspects so once again she has to find out who the killer is.

This is a hilarious amateur sleuth mystery as the heroine goes from one crisis to another trying to pull the Route 66 yard sale together. Denise Swanson never lets her characters get stale as they constantly grow. IN MURDER OF A SMART COOKIE, the author has a lot of surprises in store for the reader as the characters undergo certain changes in their lives ever the secondary support cast. This is one mystery series that just keeps getting better and better.

Signet, July 2005, $6.99, 272 pp.

ISBN 0451215842

Harriet Klausner