Book description
Newspaper librarian Maddy Sprowls never gives story ideas to the
editors at The Hannawa Herald-Union. She pre-fers to stay in the
newspaper “morgue” and do her job, and hopes the editors stay in the
newsroom and do theirs. Then one Saturday she sees four elderly women
get out of a taxicab at a garage sale. She figures that those women must
hire the cabby every week to drive them from garage sale to garage sale.
And wouldn't that make a great feature story for the paper? Monday
morning she runs straight to the newsroom with her idea. Shortly after
the story runs, one of the four women is murdered: retired antique
dealer Violeta Bell. Maddy wants no part of the investigation, but
before she knows it, she's on another of her infamous snoopathons. And,
good gravy, enjoying every minute of it. Violeta Bell is an enigma. She
even claimed to be the Queen of Romania. Could it be true? Maddy
Sprowls solves the murder of the Queen of Romania. Violeta Bell grandly
insisted she was Romania's rightful monarch, even though the scrappy
septuagenarian had been living for years in a retirement home in the
States, spending Saturdays with three other old-timers hunting for
yard-sale treasures under the watchful eye of weekend driver Eddie
French. When Violeta is found in her undies shot through the heart in
the fitness room, cub reporter Gabriella Nash tearfully wonders if her
feature story on the group led to the murder. So many of Violeta's
antiques are found in Eddie's house that he gets indicted, but when her
boss's wife challenges Maddy to prove the innocence of her dear sorority
sister's brother, Maddy agrees. The trail takes her to Canada's Wolfe
Island and the real pretender to the Romanian throne, then back to the
corridors of the retirement home, where Violeta may have been romancing
another old fogy who was three-timing his wife, and finally to Eddie's
digs, where Maddy unravels a fake antiques scheme. A whopping sexual
secret will be disclosed before all is resolved, and Maddy can return to
sorting and storing newspaper stories again. The humor is a bit more
forced than in Maddy's earlier adventures (Dig, 2005, etc.), but
Corwin's plotting has improved. And newspaper junkies will still enjoy
the city-room squabbling. C. R. Corwin lives in Akron, Ohio with his
wife, Carol, and a pair of inexhaustible Shetland sheepdogs, Nellie and
Dudley. A former newspaperman, he teaches a “Writing That Novel” course
at the University of Akron.
