Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier

Item: Valentine Murder
Rating: 5
Author: karenbaron

Posted February 15, 2023 by karenbaron in #ValentineReads, Mystery, Review, Series / 0 Comments

Valentine Murder

by Leslie Meier

Series: Lucy Stone #5
Series Rating:

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation on February 1, 1999
Genres: Cozy Holiday Mystery
Pages: 276
Format: Kindle
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Get Your Copy at: Amazon, Books-A-Million
Also in this series: Trick Or Treat Murder, Wicked Witch Murder , Father's Day Murder

It’s Valentine’s Day in Tinker’s Cove. And while the cupcakes Lucy Stone is baking for her children will have pink frosting and candy hearts, Lucy’s thoughts aren’t centered on sugary sentiments. She’s barely arrived at her first board meeting of the newly-renovated library when Bitsy Howell, the new librarian, is found dead in the basement, shot only minutes before story hour was to start. The agitated board members assume that Bitsy was killed by an outsider, until Detective Lt. Horowitz arrives on the scene and announces that the killer is among them.

Lucy was already aware that Bitsy’s uppity big city ways rubbed some people in Tinker’s Cove the wrong way. But she has a hunch that motives for the librarian’s violent death run a lot deeper. From Hayden Norcross’s elegant antique shop to Corney Clark’s chic kitchen, Lucy relentlessly snoops into the curious lifestyles and shocking secrets of Tinker’s Cove’s most solid citizens—secrets that will plunge her into a terrifying confrontation with a conniving killer…

Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier has Lucy Stone solving the murder of Bitsy Howell before anything bad happens to anyone else.

Will Lucy solve the mystery before the killer goes after her?

Lucy Stone is the newest director on the library’s board of directors for Tinker Cove, Maine. She is nervous about her first meeting and hesitates to solve the case despite being asked. Lucy is on the newer side of being a sleuth. She is married and a mom to 4 kids. Three girls and one boy. I love how Lucy solves the case in her way and how she goes about doing that in the early days of her books. Lucy hopes she is raising her kids correctly while trying to do things for herself for a change. Well, despite that, her youngest is only four years old. I love Lucy as a character, and I can’t wait to see how different she is in the next book I read.

The Mystery

Two weeks before Valentine’s Day, she has her first board meeting, and Lucy decides to get Bitsy for Story Hour when she discovers her body. Lucy takes it upon herself to look into the case but not really look into the mystery. She tries her best not to get too involved in solving the case to risk her kids, her husband, or her own life. Sadly, all sleuths take risks when they try to solve a mystery. I solved the case before Lucy did, but not the motive until she uncovered that since I couldn’t figure it out. Okay, I did wish it was someone else, but I quickly ruled them out when I remembered some other clues.

Five Stars

I am giving five stars to Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier and recommending it. This was a fantastic cozy holiday mystery read. I loved how everything happened and the simpler times of the nineties. Ms. Meier brings me into her stories to make it seem like I’m helping the sleuth out, especially with solving the case.

This is another series where it doesn’t matter where you pop into the installments. Trust me, and I’ve read Lucy at different stages of motherhood, her journalism career, and her love life with her husband. Either way, Ms. Meier knows she has a great series on hand and one that doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. For which I am grateful.

Lucy Stone Mystery Series

Thank you for dropping by! I hope you enjoyed this review of Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier.

Until the next time,

Happy Reading!

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.

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