read: The Alpine Advocate (4 stars)

The Alpine Advocate by Mary Daheim

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the mood for some small town shenanigans and murder? This book is for you. You won't find pulse pounding thrills or crackling prose. This is a straight-ahead, pleasantly written, cozy mystery set in a little town that once existed, but was never like this.

There's a lot of setting up happening in the first half of this book. We're learning about Emma Lord, her son, her town, her former lovers, the eccentric staff of her newspaper, the equally eccentric population of the rest of the town, and a murder. At first I feared that it would all turn out to be too cloying and contrived to be tolerable. But the plot finally settled down into some reasonably intelligent sleuthing and the hints and allegations started mounting up.

This is a good example of this sort of fiction. I couldn't settle for only 3 stars, so it gets 4.

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