Dead, Bath, and Beyond: 10/28/21

Dead, Bath, and Beyond by Lorraine Bartlett and Laurie Cass is the fourth of the Victoria Square mystery series. Katie Bonner has spent her summer free time sailing Lake Ontario with her friend Seth Lander. On their last day out she meets her old boss and they get into a heated argument. The next day he's found dead in a bath tub at the yet to be opened B&B.

Katie doesn't believe either man could have committed murder and she aims to find out who did before one of them is arrested. The first problem: too many people hated her old boss. The second problem is: who had access to a partially open B&B?

On my first round through of listening I spotted the murder but I didn't catch their name. In the climax, Katie runs into the murder in an out of context situation and refers to them by name. Since I missed their name in their introductory scene, I was very confused indeed. Who was this person? Was this person who I fingered as the murder?

What I ended up re-listening to the first forty minutes or so of the novel until I found the scene I was sure introduced the murder. This time I listened more carefully and caught the character's name. The person I predicted would be caught ended up being the one from the climax.

The one glaring question of Dead, Bath, and Beyond is why did the murder move the body? Katie suggests that it was done out of homophobia with the hopes one of the two men would be tried and convicted. Maybe, but to the observant reader, the change in location severely narrows the list of possible suspects. The big question then becomes what is the motivation of the remaining handful of suspects?

The fifth book in the series is Yule Be Dead (2018).

Four stars

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