Review by Booklist Review
Hyde's third entry in her Crime with the Classics series (after Arsenic with Austen, 2016, and Bloodstains with Brontë, 2017) this time pays homage to Agatha Christie. Widow Emily Cavanaugh, on sabbatical from teaching literature at Reed College, is hosting her first Windy Corner Writers' Retreat before Christmas in the Victorian mansion she inherited from her great aunt Beatrice in a small Oregon coastal town. But her six guests include two clunkers: rude memoirist Dustin Weaver and a gate-crashing writer of lurid paperbacks pen-named Cruella Crime, who has harmed two of the other guests and is blackmailing another. Winter storms leave roads too icy for travel, so the group is isolated when Cruella is found dying from cyanide put in a bottle of amaretto given to Emily as a gift. Sheriff Luke Richards, who has repeatedly proposed to Emily, struggles to overcome his jealousy of her instant warm friendship with guest Oscar Lansing when there's another murder attempt. So a confrontation is arranged, with Luke taking the Hercule Poirot role, to lay out the crimes and name the killer. Another winning cozy, with love finally prevailing.--Michele Leber Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Hyde's so-so third Crime with the Classics mystery (after 2017's Bloodstains with BrontA«), Emily Cavanaugh has taken a sabbatical from her position as a literature professor after inheriting Windy Corner in Stony Beach, Ore., and has set about transforming the house into a writers' retreat. Her first guests, who include Ian MacDonald, a noted novelist, and Oscar Lansing, a struggling academic, are housebound during a storm. Lt. Luke Richards, the local lawman, who has been persistent in his efforts to persuade Emily to marry him, is also present, and becomes increasingly jealous of her rapport with Oscar. After some heavy-handed foreshadowing, someone is poisoned, though it's unclear whether the murderer killed the intended victim. The breezy attitude toward death (a friend of Emily calls this murder "fun," in contrast to a previous one at Windy Corners, which she considered "rather a nuisance") undercuts the emotional resonance of the final Dickensian twist. Readers with a high tolerance for Jessica Fletcher syndrome are most likely to enjoy this one. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Murder strikes yet another writers' retreat.Readers who anticipate a raucous tale of a poisoner who enlists New Jersey's ex-governor as an accomplice will be sorely disappointed to see Hyde serve up that hoariest of chestnuts, a country-house murder. The house is Windy Corner Writers' Retreat Center, an old Victorian mansion on the Oregon coast inherited by Reed College professor Emily Cavanaugh. Hoping to lure the next generation of Austens and Dostoevskys to create their masterworks in her library, Emily names each of the mansion's many bedrooms after a literary titan. Windy Corner's maiden effort at promoting literary greatness includes a Reed College adjunct who studies Forster's "view of the individual in society, across all the novels," a memoirist, a "well-known writer of highbrow mysteries," a writer of cozies, and straight-outta-Paris Marguerite Grenier, Emily's best friend, who talks to her pal in untranslated French. At first, memoirist Dustin Weaver looks like the obvious victim. He snubs the adjunct, ridicules the other writers, and scarfs down whatever alcohol he can find. (Since Emily's too refined to keep whiskey in the house, he has to make do with the sherry she reserves for cocktail hour.) But the arrival of bestselling author Cruella Crime puts Weaver in his place. Ostentatiously mean, Cruella seems to have the goods on every member of the party and isn't shy about slinging innuendoes. Enter the obligatory ice storm, and the trapped authors get to watch in horror as Cruella downs a cordial laced with cyanide during a game of charades. Emily's long-suffering beau, Lt. Luke Richards, lands the task of finding out who killed Cruella as well as the honor of sleeping on Emily's fold-out loveseat every night.Hyde (Bloodstains with Bronte, 2017, etc.) invites her readers into a confined space that's stuffy, not tense. Even her villain has no bite. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
