Trick Or Treat Murder
by Leslie Meier
Series: Lucy Stone #3
Series Rating:
Published by Kensington on September 3rd 2013
Genres: Cozy Holiday Mystery
Pages: 276
Format: Kindle
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Get Your Copy at: Amazon
Also in this series: Wicked Witch Murder , Father's Day Murder , Valentine Murder
Haunted-house parties and ghostly galas…grinning pumpkins, mayhem and murder. It’s going to be one heck of a Halloween for Lucy Stone and Tinker’s Cove…
It’s October in Maine, and everyone in Tinker’s Cove is preparing for the annual Halloween festival. While Lucy Stone is whipping up orange-frosted cupcakes, recycling tutus for her daughters’ Halloween costumes, helping her son with his pre-teen rebellion, and breast-feeding her brand-new baby, an arsonist is loose in Tinker’s Cove. When the latest fire claims the life of the owner of the town’s oldest house, arson turns into murder…
While the townsfolk work to transform a dilapidated mansion into a haunted house for the All-Ghouls festival, the hunt for the culprit heats up. Trick-or-treat turns deadly as a little digging in all the wrong places puts Lucy too close to a shocking discovery that could send all her best-laid plans up in smoke…
Can the arsonist be found before any more bad can happen?
Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier is my first book of this Lucy Stone series. I am happy to say that it didn’t disappoint at all. This book was a great read that kept me guessing throughout the entire story. Thinking I knew who the arsonist was just to be proven wrong at the end of the book. I completely fell for the red herring, and I was shocked by who did it, but I did love the way it wrapped up. Everything about this book was brilliant.
The Main Character
Trick or Treat Murder’s main character is Lucy Stone. She’s a great character in my mind. She is very developed in this book. It seems like Lucy loves what she has become, a wife, and a mother. I love that she embraces that and tries her hardest to be herself while being there for her kids. Lucy wants to try to find out what happened regarding these fires. She wants the person to stop and everyone to be safe.
The Love Interest
Unlike with other cozy mysteries where the love interest is always in law enforcement this time it’s different. Lucy’s husband is Bill Stone, and he is a restoration contractor. That means he restores old homes doesn’t matter what year or century that it is either. He is just trying to make money fixing old houses, and he loves his job. Bill and Lucy go through a lot of things. He’s a great husband and father to Lucy and the kids. I love the little flirty banter that the two of them have despite the many years that they have been together and having five kids together…Or at least I think. Again like I said this is my first book in this series.
The Villain
Now, I can’t exactly spoil it. I try not to do that in the reviews. Let’s just say beware of the red herrings when you are reading this book. There are quite a few of them and can totally fool you into thinking that they did it. That’s the way it went with me.
Five Stars
I am giving Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier’s a five-star review. I loved this book and bought this book in a box set called Halloween Murder. The Lucy Stone Series is now the next cozy mystery series that I wouldn’t mind reading from the beginning. If I had any time to do that.
Anyways until the next time enjoy this review brought to you by
About Leslie Meier
I started writing in the late ‘80s when I was attending graduate classes at Bridgewater State College. I wanted to become certified to teach high school English and one of the required courses was Writing and the Teaching of Writing. My professor suggested that one of the papers I wrote for that course was good enough to be published and I sent it off to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s Department of First Stories. I got $100 for the story and I’ve been writing ever since. The teaching, however, didn’t work out.
My books draw heavily on my experience as a mother of three and my work as a reporter for various weekly newspapers on Cape Cod. My heroine, Lucy Stone, is a reporter in the fictional town of Tinker’s Cove, Maine, where she lives in an old farmhouse (quite similar to mine on Cape Cod!) with her restoration carpenter husband Bill and four children. As the series has progressed the kids have grown older, roughly paralleling my own family. We seem to have reached a point beyond which Lucy cannot age–my editor seems to want her to remain forty-something forever, though I have to admit I personally am dying to write “Menopause is Murder!”
I usually write one Lucy Stone mystery every year and as you can tell, my editor likes me to feature the holidays in my books. Of course Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year and my newest mystery “Eggnog Murder,” is included in an anthology with two other Christmas novellas by Barbara Ross and Lee Hollis. I’ve long been a fan of the classic English country house mystery, and was a faithful watcher of “Downton Abbey,” so I couldn’t resist trying to write one. I think I succeeded rather well, if I do say so myself, with “British Manor Murder,” which came out in October, 2016.
My books are classified as “cozies” but a good friend insists they are really “comedies of manners” and I do enjoy expressing my view of contemporary American life.
Now that the kids are grown — we have five fabulous grandchildren — my husband and I are enjoying dividing our time between Braintree and Cape Cod, along with our cat, Sylvester.
The above and picture were taken from the author’s website.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- 2018 Goodreads Reading Challenge
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