Puzzle Me a Murder, the first in Roz Noonan’s Alice Pepper Lonely Hearts and Puzzle Club Mystery Series (say that three times fast), delivers a quintessential cozy mystery with a spunky twist: sleuths in their sixties using puzzles to solve a murder.
First Impressions:
The novel opens with Ruby Millener saying some very damning things after catching her husband George, West Hazel’s city comptroller, in flagrante with a woman in a blonde wig and bejeweled masquerade mask. His body is discovered soon after, and Ruby quickly becomes the prime suspect.
She turns to her childhood friend (and amateur sleuth) librarian Alice Pepper to catch the real killer! Pepper becomes West Hazel’s own Jessica Fletcher crossed with hippie-ish Dorothy Zbornak a la Murder She Wrote and Golden Girls.
This book was washed down with chamomile tea by propance fire (thank you, Washington). If you enjoyed Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, I think you’ll like this. Both are interactive, and you actually care about the sideplots. Stone Donahue is totally dreamy, by the way.
If this mystery was a puzzle it’d be average hard and have a whimsical irregular edge (much of it courtesy of Alice’s wacky, high-vibration spiritual sister, Violet). The novel equivalent of Emily Carew Woodard’s jigsaw Coffee and Snacks.
Reader Note: The small-town police in this story are unusually cooperative—a choice some readers may find strains believability. Personally, I think the genre asks for a little suspension of disbelief, so I rolled with it.
What I Liked:
The premise is adorable enough for primetime and salacious enough for network TV (big three, not Fox, pre-cable). It’s fun to solve this mystery because a lot of people want George dead; he has an enemies list longer than a CVS receipt. So you read to exonerate and defend the women you grow to love in this story.
Puzzles and murder might seem on the nose, but Noonan is clearly a puzzler:
“Not to be a snob, but Alice liked to work puzzles at home, in her own kitchen, where there was a peaceful rhythm among her friends. Sometimes the folks here got a little prissy, hoarding puzzle pieces because they wanted to work a certain section on their own.”
Alice does not merely assemble a puzzle when solving this crime; she assembles to solve this crime. Cryptic puzzles are dropped on her doorstep and she and her gal pals are deciphering clues to keep up with the caper. What Alice can’t see, someone else does, and together they form the complete image.
This is a good “sharing” book, one to pass around and discuss. Her characters span race, age, and occupation; there’s something for everybody, even to complain about.
Overall Thoughts:
This was a fast read but ran a little long. It sets the stage nicely, introducing a cast of endearing eccentrics and a small town worth revisiting—good thing the sequel, That Missing Piece Is Killing Me, was released this past summer.