Crewel Yule: 03/11/16

Crewel Yule by Monica Ferris is the eight Needlecraft mystery. The February conference has suddenly been rescheduled to December. It's inconvenient for everyone selling and buying patterns for their shops, so tensions are running high. Though it's in Memphis, a freak snow storm has closed all the roads and trapped everyone at the hotel. In the midst of all of this, one of the vendors ends up dead, an apparent suicide from the top floor.

At first glance, Crewel Yule is a re-staging of Unraveled Sleeve. Some of the same elements are there: an altered epi-pen, death at a hotel, a closed environment due to the weather, and Jill taking charge as an officer of the law when local authorities can't reach the scene. These aspects, so recently repeated irk me.

Except this time, Betsy is in her right mind and there are multiple witnesses to the death. Here then the question is can the events of a death be reconstructed from the conflicting accounts given by people already under tremendous stress? The second big question is, how can a public murder be made to look like suicide?

Here's another time when I had enough personal knowledge going into the book to understand how the murder, if it was murder, could be committed.

Four stars

Comments (0)