The new Orchard Mystery–from the New York Times bestselling author of Golden Malicious and Scandal in Skibbereen
A TREE IS KNOWN BY ITS FRUIT
It’s harvest time in Granford, Massachusetts, and orchard owner Meg Corey and her fiancé, Seth, are both racing to beat the New England winter. Meg is bringing in her apple crop with a team of workers, while Seth is working to restore an old building in the center of town. But when his project is set back due to the unexpected discovery of a skeleton under the building—and even worse, a young man related to one of Meg’s former apple pickers is found dead behind the local feed store—the couple’s carefully laid plans are quickly spoiled…
Meg can’t help but wonder: are they just unlucky, or is there something rotten in Granford? If so, she knows she’s got to seek out the bad apple before it ruins the whole bunch…
Includes Delicious Recipes
The harvest is in full swing at Meg Corey’s apple orchard and her fiancé Seth has his hands full supervising restoration projects all over town. The pair barely has time to breathe, let alone plan their wedding, but when a dead body is found behind the local feed store and the main suspect – a teenaged boy named Jeffrey – seeks their assistance in catching the real culprit, they can’t help but say yes. Can Meg and Seth make room in their busy schedules to solve the crime and exonerate Jeffrey, or have they finally bitten off more than they can chew?
Picked to Die is the eighth of Sheila Connolly’s Orchard Mysteries. Connolly’s latest starts well, with a setup that’s both quick and clever, but what follows is a bit of a mixed bag. Connolly takes great care to flesh out her characters – not just the major recurring ones, like Meg, Seth, and orchard manager Bree, but the book-specific minor players, as well. Unfortunately, though, she doesn’t put the same amount of work into developing the relationships between said characters. Meg and Seth don’t share a whole lot of chemistry for folks about to marry one another. Bree’s constant anger regarding Meg and Seth’s involvement in the murder investigation is unearned, and the conflict between them feels forced. Connolly never successfully convinces the reader why Meg cares what happens to Jeffrey, and it’s actually a bit creepy that she thinks about a random teenage stranger as much as she does in this book.
Connolly’s prose is intelligent and she manages to incorporate a fair amount of history into Picked to Die; it’s clear she researches the heck out of everything that appears in her tales, from apple-growing to migrant-labor laws to the history of farming in the US, and I never walk away from one of her books without having learned something. That said, though, the story occasionally gets bogged down by superfluous detail (we don’t need to know the history of every single building Meg sets foot in), and at times Picked to Die feels more like a class or a lecture than a murder mystery. The relative lack of action and tension further slows the pace (you never for a moment believe the police actually suspect Jeffrey), and while Connolly’s ending is both logical and tidy, it’s also anticlimactic. The end result is a book worth reading, but unless you’re a die-hard fan, probably not worth buying.
Reviewed by Kat
