This was published in 1992 so it should have SO MANY more ratings on Goodreads than it does. It was very good! Mystery/crime junkies, consider this your notice. A fun series is waiting for you. There are only four books in it, and this is the first. And if you have KU or Audible, it’s free! I highly enjoyed the audiobook experience, if you are an audiobook person.
The book opens with Blanche—who I now love with all my heart—sitting in court waiting to hear her sentence for bouncing a couple of checks. She’s in trouble but it’s not her fault. She only bounced those checks because her employers (she’s a domestic worker) didn’t pay her when they should have, and she lives literally paycheck to paycheck. She is given thirty days in jail, a situation that is undesirable in every way, not least because it would financially ruin her, and her kids would get taken away by her mother. (Her kids are adopted; her sister made her promise to take care of them before she died.)
I was so taken with Blanche’s narrative voice right away that when she takes the opportunity to just leg it out onto the street before they can haul her off to jail, I literally cheered out loud instead of what I normally would have done, which is groan out a “nooooo” and bemoan the fates of stupid characters. But Blanche is no fool. She hides out in the last place anyone would look: her work. A job she had canceled with her employment agency was never filled, so she shows up anyway for the week-long job out in the country with the agency not knowing she’s there. She figures this will give her some breathing room (and some cash) to figure out what she’s going to do next.
But this job takes all of Blanche’s patience and powers of nosiness, because something weird is going on. There are dead bodies, but they don’t turn up until about halfway. That doesn’t stop Blanche from investigating a priori. I thought for sure I had the mystery figured out, and so does Blanche, but I was absolutely tricked. Blanche in the end, was not.
I had so much fun with this book, and I have the other three books ready to go and downloaded for when I have the time. I’m already sad that there are only four, because the author started publishing later in life, and died in 2020, before she could write any more. (Although it looks like the last thing she published was a short story in 2005. I wonder why she stopped writing?)
Chipping Away at Mt. TBR, Spooky Season Edition — Book 5/31