Off My Rocker:

Recommendations from a Book Nut

Easter Mysteries
(March 2008)

The Book Nut wishes you all a very happy Easter with some Easter Mysteries!

Learned From The Easter Bunny:

• All I need to know I learned from the Easter Bunny
• Don't put all your eggs in one basket
• Walk softly and carry a big carrot
• Everyone needs a friend who is all ears.
• There's no such thing as too much chocolate.
• All work and no play can make you a basket case.
• Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day.
• Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits.
• Some body parts should be floppy.
• Keep your paws off other people's jelly beans.
• Good things come in small sugar-coated packages.
• The grass always appears greener in someone else's basket.
• To show your true colors you have to come out of your shell!

--Anonymous

AUNT DIMITY, DETECTIVE, by Nancy Atherton

During the Easter season the village of Finch, England seems a bit less cozy than usual when one of the inhabitants is murdered.

Incomer Prunella Hooper is discovered lying in a pool of blood near her front window. Rumor runs rife as the villagers look sideways at each other and seek to protect themselves since there’s no one in the village who liked the victim and far too many who had a grudge against her.

Long held secrets are exposed to the light of day and Lori Shepherd takes a new lost lamb under her wing during her investigations.

DEATH AND THE EASTER BUNNY, by Linda Berry

In this cozy-cum-police-procedural mystery Trudy Roundtree goes to work for her cousin, Henry Huckabee, police chief of Ogeechee, Georgia.

Hen has bowed to family pressure about giving Trudy a job but is not thrilled that his little girl cousin is getting mixed up in police work and tends to give her assignments where she has little chance of getting hurt. When he and the rest of the male police force get into "poison itchy weed" while on a stake-out however, he is forced to let her investigate the murder of a prominent local citizen.

Everybody knows everybody in this small town and the local school teacher knows even more and then there’s Gossip Central, the local beauty shop. The case shouldn’t be that hard to solve…should it?

CUE THE EASTER BUNNY, by Liz Evans

Liz Smith is a private investigator. Yes, she is, too! However, when business is slow, a girl still has to make ends meet. In this outing Liz is making ends meet by working for the local Tourist Board. Her assignment is to "promote the town’s ‘child friendly’ image"…dressed up as the Easter Bunny.

The job doesn’t go well so when she is approached by an honest-to-pete client who wants her to investigate death threats against the woman’s son, she leaps at the chance. Hm-m-m, bunnies should look before they leap.

This tale is quite dark in places and snortingly funny in others.