"Knitting vs Murder"
Reviewed by Sharon Salituro
Posted August 30, 2013
Mystery Cozy
YARN TO GO is the first book in Betty Hechtman's new Yarn
Retreat Mystery series. YARN TO GO is a cozy mystery
that you won't want to put down. It combines cooking,
knitting, and murder in one great book!
Meet Casey who loves to bake, and also works for a private
investigator. After her aunt dies unexpectedly she inherits
her aunt's knitting retreat group.
Casey has no idea what to do with this group. One of the
members gets murder. Casey decides to use her investigator
skills to try and solve this murder
Betty must knit, because of the way that she descripts
different knitting stitches. I do knit and some of these
abbreviations I didn't know. So that part was very helpful
to me.
One of the other things that I liked about YARN TO GO is
that
at the end, she gives the pattern for one of the items that
one character was knitting. There is also a recipe for
muffins. Since I also bake, this will be added to my
collections of recipes.
Betty's description of the retreat is breath taking. It
makes you feel that if you look out your window you could
see the same thing. The view is great. There were a couple
twists and turns in this book. I have to say, I didn't
figure this one out until the end.
Which just shows what a talented writer Betty Hechtman is.
I can't wait for the next one in this series to come out.
SUMMARY
Dessert chef Casey Feldstein doesn’t know a knitting needle
from a crochet hook. But after her aunt dies unexpectedly,
leaving Casey to run her yarn retreat business, the sweets
baker finds herself rising to the occasion—and trying to
unravel a murder mystery… When Casey finds out that her late aunt’s business, Yarn2Go,
has one more yarn retreat scheduled, she decides to go ahead
and host the event, despite her complete lack of experience
as a knitter. At least the retreat is on the beautiful
Monterey Peninsula. But the idyllic setting is soured when a retreat regular is
found murdered in her hotel room. Feeling a sense of
responsibility, Casey begins to weave the clues together and
detects a pattern which may shed light on her aunt’s
suspicious death. Despite the danger, the last thing Casey
plans to do is retreat. She’ll catch this killer…or dye
trying. Includes a knitting pattern and a recipe!
ExcerptChapter 1
I was in the middle of laying out the ingredients for my
carrot muffins when the call came. It's lucky I hadn't
started mixing them, because you can't just run off and
abandon muffin batter for an hour and expect it to be okay.
I didn't even understand who it was at first. All I heard
was something about no refund on a credit card bill, the
words retreat and that I "better do something about it."
"Who is this?" I said when the caller finally took a breath.
"Casey, this is Tag Thornkill," an exasperated voice
responded. He could have left off the last name. I mean,
it's not like I know a bunch of Tags. Immediately my
demeanor changed from irritated at the interruption to
concerned. Tag is my current employer, or half of the pair,
anyway. He and his wife Lucinda own the Blue Door
restaurant, which is where I presently work. I'm the
dessert chef. Tag doesn't know it, but I also bake muffins
for some coffee spots in town using the Blue Door's kitchen.
Lucinda had given her okay and saw no problem with the
arrangement as long as I brought in my own ingredients.
So every night when the restaurant closes and everyone
has left, I come in and bake the restaurant's desserts for
the next day, along with batches of muffins for the next
day's coffee drinkers.
Let me be clear from the start; I'm not one of those
fancy cooking school graduates who does French pastry. I
had never even thought of baking as being a career. It was
just something I started doing when I was a kid. It might
have been a reaction to having a mother who was a
cardiologist and thought cookies only came in white boxes
from the bakery.
My first experience as a dessert chef happened at a
friend's bistro. He didn't care that I didn't have any
formal training. The truth was in the cake. He loved what
I baked and hired me. Unfortunately, he sold the bistro
after six months and it became a hot dog stand that didn't
offer dessert.
After that I tried law school, but by the end of the
first semester, I knew it wasn't for me. Nor was being a
substitute teacher at a private school. Then I tested out a
lot of other professions. In other words I worked as a
temp. I did things like handing out samples of chewing gum
on street corners, spritzing perfume on anyone I could get
to slow down at a department store, some office work and my
favorite, working at a detective agency.
My poor mother was beside herself. If I'd heard it once,
I'd heard it a zillion times. "Casey, when I was your age,
I was already a doctor and a mother. And you're what...?"
Talk about knowing how to make me feel like more of a flop.
My father wasn't all that happy either. He was a doctor,
too, a pediatrician. When I broke up with Dr. Sammy
Glickner, things really hit the fan. He was my parents'
dream come true—Jewish, not just a doctor, but a
specialist, a urologist, and nice. They said nice; I said
bland. Well, not totally bland. He was very funny in a
goofy sort of way.
But I needed a fresh start. And who better to help me
with it than my father's sister, Joan Stone. Let's just say
we both had the same black sheep thing going. Her main
advantage was she actually had a profession – actress. She
wasn't an A–list star like Meryl Streep or Julia
Roberts. Most of her parts were playing somebody's Aunt
Trudy or the noisy neighbor down the street. Her one claim
to fame was she'd been the Tidy Soft toilet paper lady long
enough to build up a nice nest egg before she left L.A.,
moved up north and started a new career.
But now back to the call.
With a nice tone, I asked Tag to repeat what he'd said.
"I was checking Lucinda's credit card receipts. There
is a charge for Yarn2Go. My dear wife explained that was
your Aunt's business and the charge was for some kind of
yarn trip." He paused as if he expected me to say
something, and when I didn't, he continued. "I checked all
of her later bills and there was no mention of a refund.
What do you have to say about that?"
The "oh no" was purely in my head. Barely three months
after I'd left Chicago and relocated to my Aunt Joan's guest
house in the northern California town of Cadbury by the Sea,
my aunt had been killed in a hit–and–run
accident. It was horrible. There were no witnesses, and
the cops still had the case open, though it didn't look like
they were going to find the driver. I didn't care that
cops, my parents and all of my aunt's friends insisted it
was just an unfortunate, random accident. I didn't buy it.
Here are the basic facts. It was six thirty on a Sunday
morning. My aunt never got up before eight. No one could
explain, at least to my satisfaction, why she would have
been out walking by the water at that hour. It was barely
even light. I simply didn't buy the cops' explanation that
maybe she'd taken up an exercise program and not mentioned
it to me.
I mean, I was living in the guest house, which was just
across the driveway from her house. True, we'd agreed to
stay out of each other's lives, but still...
My aunt had left everything to me, and when I'd met with
the lawyer, he'd brought up her retreat business. While Joan
had still done occasional acting gigs, her real passion had
become putting on these retreats that she called "vacations
with a purpose." Basically all I knew about them was that
they had to do with making things with yarn and she used the
hotel and conference center across the street to host them.
Joan had tried to explain more to me, but she got totally
frustrated when I kept mixing up crocheting and knitting. I
knew that you needed two things for one of them and one for
the other, but not which for which. Needles, hooks, not my
thing. All my creative endeavors had to do with baking.
I had told the lawyer I had no intention in continuing
the business for obvious reasons. He'd looked through the
papers I'd brought in and they appeared to be for her taxes,
so for all intents and purposes, the business was over.
"So what are you going to do about it?" Tag repeated,
pulling me back to the here and now. I said something about
checking into it when I got home, but that wasn't good
enough. I could practically hear him pacing. Tag was one
of those people who went around straightening pictures on
the walls of other people's houses. He couldn't deal with
things being out of order or unsettled. He said he wouldn't
be able to sleep until it was straightened out. I glanced
at my watch and saw that it was ten o'clock. I really
wanted to continue making the muffins, but I knew Tag would
be frantic until he had an answer, and he was sort of my
boss. So I decided to run home and check. I'd finish the
muffins when I returned.
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