"An Excellent Start to a New Cozy Series"
Reviewed by Diana Troldahl
Posted January 5, 2011
Mystery Cozy | Mystery Woman Sleuth
Beth Kennedy has a life familiar to many; she is a single
mother going though the first year after a divorce,
struggling to keep her family happy and safe while
fulfilling the responsibilities of her job. But Laura Alden
has made the familiar fascinating in MURDER AT THE PTA, the
first book in a new cozy mystery series. Beth owns a children's bookshop in a small Wisconsin town.
Her best friend bamboozles her into taking an active role in
the PTA, her employee at the bookstore involves Beth in
plans for a big Halloween shindig, and a new man in town has
Beth rethinking her stand on dating so soon after the
divorce. Then the principal of the school is murdered. As
she was a thorn in the side of all who knew her, there is a
lot less mourning and a lot more ghoulish interest in the
details than if someone else had been a victim. This lack of
respect for a human life motivates Beth to take an interest
in the case, and keeping her best friend from danger makes
it imperative the knowledge Beth acquires is given to the
police. Glancing at the bare bones of the summary, you might
suspect it is another in the recent spate of hackneyed
watery cozy mysteries. You couldn't be farther from the
truth! This book is well done, very well done. Alden has
strong talent and a well-skilled use of language that brings
the story alive and gives vitality to each character. It is
all too easy to become tired of cozy mysteries where plots
are wrenched out of any linear logic and herrings of all
colors are dragged across the paths of deductions just to
facilitate cutesy or falsely-dangerous confrontations easily
avoided through a smidgeon of common sense in the heroine.
Thanks to all the gods of publishing, this series is
different. Beth's decisions are believable, the jeopardy
real, her motivations make sense within the framework of her
life, and you find yourself rooting for her from the first
page instead of wanting to shake sense into yet another "too
stupid to live" heroine. I devoured this book, falling
gleefully into the story and enjoying every minute. I
predict Laura Alden is at the beginning of a long career
with loads of grateful fans climbing on board the series
with each new entry. Her second book Foul Play at the
PTA is due out in July 2011.
SUMMARY
As the owner of a children's bookshop in the quaint town of
Rynwood, Wisconsin, and a mother of two, Beth Kennedy has a
full plate. So when her best friend, Marina, asks her to
become the secretary for Tarver Elementary School's PTA,
Beth can think of better ways to occupy what little free
time she has. But after some arm-twisting (Marina's favorite
activity), Beth agrees to come on board. The course of PTA meetings never has run smoothly, but when
Tarver's unpopular principal turns up dead, Beth realizes
that making bake sales wheat-free and funding class trips
weren't the only things on the agenda. Then the local gossip
blogs, WisconSINS, starts fanning the flames of speculation,
and it seems like everyone is a suspect---especially certain
members of the PTA. Beth knows she must race to find the
killer before he teaches another fatal lesson....
ExcerptChapter 1
"You need to get out more," Marina said.
As I was in her backyard, my best friend’s comment was
obviously incorrect. "I am out."
"Don’t be a putz." Without turning, she spoke to a
five-year-old playing in the nearby sandbox. "Andrew, don’t
whack your sister on the head. It’s not good for you, her,
or that piece of processed petroleum stamped into a plastic
toy shape in China by underpaid employees and brought to
this country on a container ship undoubtedly carrying
illegal aliens."
Marina and I stood in the late-September sunshine of
Rynwood, Wisconsin, enjoying the warm weather. There
wouldn’t be many more days like this before the cold of
winter set in, and Marina was a big believer in outside play
for the children in her home daycare.
"You know what I mean, Beth," she said to me. "Socially out."
On the inside I was shrieking, No! It hasn’t been long
enough! The kids aren’t ready! I’m not ready! On the
outside, my lips tightened an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.
"Now, don’t look like that." Marina shook her finger at
me; she was the only person outside of a sitcom I’d ever
seen actually do such a thing. "It’s been a year since the
divorce."
A year and eight days of sleeping alone, but who was
counting?
"Which makes this a perfect time to get back into
action." A wisp of Marina’s light red hair fell out of her
ponytail and across her plump cheek. We looked across the
yard to where my ten-year-old daughter, Jenna, had
barricaded herself in a tree fort and was dropping bits of
maple leaf onto the head of my seven-year-old son. Oliver
was red faced and grunting from the effort of trying to
reach the lowest branch of the tree.
Ripping apart their young lives with divorce had been the
hardest thing I’d ever done. Jenna had taken it on the chin,
but Oliver had started sleeping with a pile of stuffed
animals big enough to smother him, and every single one had
to be given a kiss good night. Bedtime took forever in our
house. I knew I should start weaning him off the animals,
just as I knew I should start talking to Jenna about the
Wonders of Womanhood. After Christmas, I thought. Why rush
things?
"Know what?" Marina pushed back the stray hairs. More,
and then more, would fall out of the ponytail without her
noticing, and finally the full glory of her reddish locks
would cascade over her shoulders. The hair scrunchie would
be on the floor, or in the yard, or in the car, or on the
kitchen counter. Marina dropped hair scrunchies like Hansel
and Gretel dropped bread crumbs. "I ran into Dave Patterson
the other day-" Her extrasensory powers reasserted
themselves. "Nathan! Don’t climb the fence."
"But my mom’s here!" Young Nathan jumped, trying to swing
his legs over the white picket fence.
"Wait for your mother to open the gate."
Nathan jumped again.
"Gate!" Marina’s sharp command was like a whip. The boy
dropped to the ground.
"Hey, Marina." A slim blond woman walked up the side
yard’s stone path and stood at the gate. "Wonderful day. Oh,
hi, Beth. Got a new name for that bookstore yet?"
Debra-don’t-call-me-Debbie O’Conner grinned at me.
If I’d been blessed with quick wit instead of quick
alphabetizing skills, I would have come up with something
clever enough to silence Nathan’s overly perfect mother. But
since I hadn’t come up with anything better than the current
"Children’s Bookshelf" since I’d bought the store two years
ago, I just shrugged. "Not yet."
Debra opened the childproof latch with one hand, a task
that took me two hands and a considerable amount of sotto
voce cursing. "Let’s go, kiddo," she said to her son. "See
you ladies later. I’d love to stop and chat, but the book
club is at our house tonight, and I need to fill the cream
puffs I baked last night. Bye!"
Cream puffs? No one made cream puffs. You bought them
from the bakery or thawed them after getting a box out of
the grocery store’s freezer. I climbed the stairs to the
deck and sat in a plastic green chair, feeling inadequate.
Cooking I could do, but baking? The last thing I’d baked
from scratch had been cupcakes for Jenna’s birthday-her
eighth. It hadn’t gone well.
"Quit that." The deck stairs squeaked under Marina’s weight.
"What?"
"You have that comparing-apples-and-oranges look.
Speaking of which, did you know Debra can’t swim?"
"Please. Everyone knows how to swim."
Marina shook her head. "Can’t swim a stroke. She’s so
scared of water, she wears a life jacket around a pool."
My childhood bulletin board had been crowded with hockey
photos and blue ribbons from summer swim meets. I could do
something better than Debra? Inconceivable. She was my
opposite in a thousand ways-blond, where I was mousy brown;
slim, which I hadn’t been in years; elegant in a way I only
dreamed about. "Why didn’t you ever tell me?"
"Didn’t know until the other day. Which was the same day
I ran into Dave Patterson. We were at the community pool for
the ducky swim class, see, and-" Her smile was a little too
wide, and she was talking a little too fast, clear
indications she was trying to convince me to do something I
didn’t want to do.
"I’m not going to date Dave Patterson." I didn’t want to
date anyone. All I wanted was to raise my children and to
run my store. I wanted everything and everyone safe and
sound; no traumas; no tragedies; no upsets or upheavals-a
peaceful Goodnight Moon existence.
"He’s not bad looking." Marina waggled her eyebrows.
"I don’t care if he’s Apollo reincarnated. I’m not ready
to date anyone. Not yet." Or ever. Men left the toilet seat
up and complained about mowing the lawn. Why bother with them?
"How about-"
"No," I said as firmly as I could, which must not have
been firmly enough, because she looked ready to offer up
another victim. "Maybe in the spring," I said.
She looked thoughtful, and I was sorry I hadn’t said a
year. Marina’s circle of friends was larger and more varied
than mine. We overlapped solely because we’d been neighbors
years ago, before Richard had decided to move us into a
brand-new pseudo-Victorian house more suitable for his
status as CFO of a large insurance company. Maybe living in
a ranch house three blocks away from the elementary school
didn’t fit Richard’s image, but it worked wonderfully for
Marina’s home daycare business. She watched two children
during the day, and three more walked to her house after school.
"Okay," she said. "No dating."
I slid down a little in my chair. Safe and sound. No
pressure. Just the peace and warmth of early fall. Leaves
turning yellow, orange, and red against the bright blue sky.
A tangy earthy smell in the air-that special autumnal scent
that summoned memories of high school football games,
trick-or-treating, and scooping wet stringy seeds out of
pumpkins. I closed my eyes and breathed in fading images of
Jenna in a princess costume and of Oliver dressed as his
favorite stuffed animal.
"Then how about being the secretary of the school’s
Parent Teacher Association?" Marina ran the words together
as fast as an auctioneer trying to unload a box of moldy books.
I opened my eyes and sat up straight. She couldn’t
possibly have said what I thought she’d said.
"You’d make a great committee secretary. You’re
organized. You do what you say you will. You know how to do
things. You’re reliable. Responsible. People trust you." Her
smile stretched two feet wide.
"What makes you think I know how to do things?"
"You don’t give yourself enough credit. You own a
business, for crying out loud. Doing this little secretary
thing would be a piece of cake."
"If it’s so little, you do it."
"My darling,"-"daah-ling" it came out-"think about what
you just said."
I did. I thought about it, visualized it, and rejected
it. Marina, with her big heart and cheer and love and
flamboyance, was not what you’d call efficient. Her husband
and youngest son got fed on time, and her college-aged
children got regular care packages in the mail, but her desk
looked like a horizontal wastebasket. Paperwork was not her
strength.
"What happened to the old secretary?" I asked. Though I
was a member of the Tarver Elementary PTA, I’d skipped most
of last year’s meetings. Raising money for handicapped
playground equipment was important, as were most of the
causes, but my children had needed me more than the PTA did.
"You’ll make a great secretary," Marina repeated. "And
you need more social interaction. Running that bookstore
doesn’t count."
"The kids-"
"PTA meetings are on Wednesday, and Richard has the kids
that night, yes? I bet you’re not doing anything fun with
that free time. I bet you do laundry. Maybe sometimes you go
wild and balance your checkbook."
Chores weren’t my typical Wednesday night, but I wasn’t
going to tell even my best friend what I did do.
Jenna dropped out of the tree and tore across the yard.
Oliver gave up his attempt to climb Tree Everest and tore
after her, his shrieks joining hers. Marina’s surprise
child, nine-year-old Zach, abandoned his pogo stick and
followed. In seconds the yard was full of children playing a
bizarre variety of tag. My flesh and blood didn’t look at me
once.
A tiny piece of my silly sentimental heart shredded into
pieces. My babies were growing up. Maybe it was time for me
to grow up, too. "Okay," I said, sighing. "I’ll run. For
secretary. I probably won’t win, but I’ll run."
"Hallelujah!" Marina clapped her hands, leapt out of her
chair, and pulled me into a hard hug. "Bet you dinner and a
movie that you win."
"You’re on."
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