Meg Corey loves the family homestead and orchard she inherited and is proud to have her first apple season behind her. She is taking advantage of the off-season to work on her family history and with the help of her orchard manager, Bree, evaluate the finances of the fledgling apple business.

Meg is facing her first New England winter, and there are so many things to fix up on her old home, she doesn’t know where to begin. Her furnace quits right when the biggest blizzard in years hits the area. Luckily her neighbor, Seth Chapin, is on hand to help her wait out the storm. While snowbound, Meg finds an antique mourning sampler, possibly made by one of her ancestors. She also makes a not so pleasant discovery – someone appears to be playing pranks on her, and the culprit is getting increasingly daring and dangerous.
There are a few different storylines in this book. While surviving a power outage and snowstorm, Meg is evaluating if she should continue to make a go of the apple business, but this is hard to do since Bree hasn’t completed the necessary financial reports. Meg is also examining her feelings and whether or not she wants to pursue a more serious relationship with Seth, a decision complicated by the fact that she and Seth are staying together in Meg’s home.

There are also a few mysteries for Meg to solve. After discovering the embroidery sampler, Meg is determined to find more information about its creator, but her research is limited by the power outage and snow-covered roads. Meg also wants to get to the bottom of who is playing pranks, such as destroying her fence and leaving a dead squirrel on her porch, before someone gets hurt. There is a hint of a murder mystery tied to some of Meg’s genealogy research, and Meg enthusiastically seeks more information related to the deaths from long ago.

I like the character of Meg, although I don’t understand some of her decisions. For example, Meg says Bree is wonderful at handling the daily operation of the orchard, but not much for recordkeeping. Then we learn Meg was formerly a financial analyst, and yet she has put all responsibility for tracking and reviewing the orchard’s finances into Bree’s hands. Later when Meg’s furnace dies, she refuses to go to Seth’s house that has a functioning heater, so the two of them suffer through the storm at Meg’s ice-cold house.

In addition to some of Meg’s puzzling actions, there is some inconsistency in the way the story is told. When Meg first finds the needlework and calls it a sampler, Seth says, “I thought a sampler was where girls tried out different stitches and made alphabets.” However, only a few pages later, Seth says he wrote a college paper on “mourning samplers” in New England. This type of contradiction in a book frustrates me. Also, the storyline related to the pranks goes on throughout the most of the book, but it takes a while for Meg to catch on that the events can’t be accidental, and it takes even longer for her to do anything to stop them, which becomes tiresome.

Bitter Harvest has all the elements of great cozy:  a small town setting, a likeable main character with an appealing love interest, and information about a unique hobby or profession. Meg is a strong, independent woman and her relationship with Seth has potential. The apple orchard setting is unique and the genealogical information included as part of this storyline adds interesting historical details and is well-integrated into the story. However, somehow all the ingredients don’t come together the way I had hoped, and the book is disappointing.

Chapters go by without any advancement of the plot, and the outcome of the book is fairly predictable, with the exception of one surprise at the end dealing with current actions tied to events from the past. With the orchard business at a standstill for the winter, Meg’s genealogical research is the highlight of the book. Most of the book describes the day-to-day details of Meg’s life, which makes for a relaxing, but not very exciting read.  Readers who enjoy the New England setting of Leslie Meier’s Lucy Stone mysteries or Jessica Fletcher/Donald Bain’s Murder She Wrote series may enjoy paying a visit to Granford, Connecticut, as long as they don’t mind a laid back story with minimal action.

~ Christine K.