toying with a murderer

Molly Kimball is excited to be spending her first English Christmas in Cambridge, since she and her mother had moved from Vermont to help with the family bookshop. But when a toy store reopens down the street, she is doubly excited. When she goes to the local bakery to get some coffee and a scone, she meets the new owner of the toy store, Charlotte Pemberly.

Charlotte had inherited the shop from her grandfather, who had passed. His will had given Charlotte everything, but he had been married for a short while to a woman named Althea Winters, and she is contesting the will, along with her grandchildren, especially since the inheritance is not just for the toy store but it includes a rare Madame Alexander doll worth half a million pounds. But the doll has gone missing, and Charlotte thinks that Althea or maybe her family members had been breaking into the stop to look for it.

Charlotte invites Molly over for a tour of the shop, and Molly readily agrees along with her best friend and the owner of the bakery, Daisy. Molly in particular had been taken with a dollhouse that Charlotte had put in the store window, and she couldn’t wait to get a closer look. But as they’re looking around the store, Charlotte finds Althea’s grandson in the breakroom. He was on the sofa, not looking at all well, with a cake box in his hands. The women call an ambulance and take a look at what he’d been eating. It was in a box and with a card from Daisy’s shop, but she’s quick to say that she didn’t make the cake. It had blue frosting, and she refuses to use blue frosting.

The ambulance shows up and takes him to the hospital, and not too long after that, the police show up. They believe that he was poisoned by the cakes, and it looks like Daisy was set up to take the fall. Molly immediately thinks that Charlotte was the one who was supposed to eat the cake, and she can’t help but think it had to do with Althea. As Molly tries to unravel what’s goin on, trying to keep both Daisy and Molly from the danger she thinks is around them, she also starts to wonder if maybe something nefarious had befallen Charlotte’s grandfather. Could he have been poisoned also?

As Molly enjoys the Christmas season, decorating the bookshop and even lending her singing voice to a madrigal celebration, she also tries to figure out what is going on with Charlotte and her family. As she gathers a list of suspects and tries to figure out who was where and when, who has a motive, and who is cold enough to try to murder someone, she finds herself in the sights of a murderer. Will she survive to see the new year?

Madrigals and Mayhem is the fourth book in Elizabeth Penney’s gentle Cambridge Bookshop mystery series. This one blends a murder mystery with Christmas traditions, a treasure hunt, and a book within a book. The use of the dollhouse and the book about the dollhouse add a layer of intrigue to the crimes happening to Charlotte and her toy store, and it adds a texture to the story that is unexpected and lovely. I really enjoyed this book and thought that it adds an intriguing set of crimes to a lovely setting for a Christmas themed mystery.

Egalleys for Madrigals and Mayhem were provided by Minotaur Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.