My First Visit to Tinker’s Cove Will Not Be the Last

By

Scott D. Parker

The books of Leslie Meier first popped onto my radar in 2020 when John McDougall of Murder by the Book here in Houston binge read them. But I didn’t read any. Last fall when I searched for a mystery to read during the Halloween season, I saw her name again. Didn’t bite. Even when John selected Easter Bunny Murder earlier this year as part of Murder by the Book’s excellent subscription service [There are 3 options; have a look], I still didn’t start a Meier book.

But I have now.

I’m a seasonal reader. When it’s summer, I want a summer-type book. Ditto for the holidays, so when September rolled around, I got to think “I bet Leslie Meier has a Labor Day book.” Well, she doesn’t, but she’s got the next best thing as illustrated by the title: Back to School Murder.

A Great Marketing Hook

Starting in 1991 (!) with Mistletoe Murder, nearly every book in the Lucy Stone series revolves around a holiday. Chances are pretty good that you could go through and entire year’s worth of holidays and there’d be a Lucy Stone mystery ready for you. It’s a great marketing strategy and I wonder if Meier had that in mind from the jump or if it was an organic process.

A Delightfully Real Protagonist

Lucy Stone is her amateur detective, but that’s not all she is. In Back to School Murder—published in 1997, it’s the fourth book in the series—she is a forty-year-old woman, wife, and mother of four kids whose ages range from younger high school to toddler. Her husband, Bill, is a carpenter who specializes in restorations.

As the story opens, Lucy is filling in (for a friend who is helping her mom with chemo) as a reporter for The Pennysaver, a weekly publication for the small town of Tinker’s Cove. Up until the reporter gig, she is a stay-at-home mom who finds herself at a crossroad of life: is being a mom and wife all there is? The reporter job gives her a glimpse of a life beyond the home and one she puts to good use when a bomb goes off in the school.

Yeah, I’ll admit that for a book published in 1991, a bomb in a school struck close to home as I was reading in 2022. But the bomb was only a part of the story. It turns out that one of the teachers, Carol Crane, is seen rescuing a handicapped boy who somehow was not evacuated with the rest of the children. And it’s just in time, for no sooner did all the bystanders see Carol running out of the building that the windows are shattered.

Imagine Lucy’s surprise, however, when a few days later—and after a contentious school board meeting in which Carol stepped on a few toes—the news comes in that Carol was murdered in her bed. Now, Lucy the reporter starts to work on the tribute for the paper…and things don’t add up.

A Murder in the Middle of Real Life

Well, like every good amateur sleuth, Lucy starts to look for more information, sifting through new clues, trying to find out more about Carol and her past. But here’s a key aspect of this book: Lucy does all of this around her real life. There were chunks of this book where Meier just followed Lucy in her night school class or dealing with sick children, the mystery not even top of Lucy’s mind.

Turns out, I rather enjoyed that aspect of the story. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Lucy Stone is a fun protagonist, a real person, not some super detective or stalwart police officer. She does what most of us would like to think we’d do: keep asking questions. Partly it’s to protect her community, but it’s also to find the truth. I liked it when she was just a mom taking care of the kids. I liked it when she gossiped with her friends. I liked it when real life interfered with her tracking down the killer.

In fact, I liked this story so much that I’m already looking for the next holiday so I can return to Tinker’s Cove. And with 28 books, I’ll have many happy visits.

Funny History Realization

As an aside, I had to laugh when Lucy’s editor hand carried a floppy disk to the printers so the weekly issue of the Pennysaver could be published. What mad me laugh was my own realization of just how far we’ve come since 1991. When I read a book from the 1940s, for examples, I intrinsically know that there are no cellphones or internet or computers. But somehow, with the somewhat modern setting of this 1991 mystery, I had forgotten that the internet barely existed in that year. And yeah, you couldn’t just email a file to the printer.

My how times have changed. 

Cozy College

It's been awhile since I wrote about my enrollment in Cozy College. Start here, then keep going here.

See how they burn

 

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Reading to be Scared

Anytime you pick up a horror tale, short story or a novel, you are presumably reading to be scared.  And since it is Halloween season, I was doing some thinking recently about the horror stories I've read and found the most frightening.  Some of a story's effect depends on where you read it, naturally; it's harder to be frightened reading a novel on the subway (unless there's something happening on the subway that is itself frightening, always a possibility) than it is, say, alone at night in an empty house or apartment.  But if you do enjoy being scared while reading, you will go out of your way, when possible and when the mood suits you, to read in a place or at a time that will be conducive to maximum tension in your reading experience.

Thinking back over many years, I can't think of a book that scared me more than Pet Sematary, and while the book is frightening in its own right, part of the experience had to do with where I read it.  This was quite a while ago, when I was taking what turned out to be a seven-month trip through Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala.  At this point in the trip, I had rented a small house, a very simple house, in the town of San Pedro along Lake Atitlan, an absolutely beautiful spot.  Here for about a month and a half I lived by myself, in relative isolation, with the main part of the town a fifteen minute walk away, woods immediately around me, and nobody else living nearby.  There was a small general goods store not far from the house, but that was closed at night and the woman who ran it lived in town.  The house's owner, who I'd rented it from, came to visit me every morning with fresh bottled milk, but he never swung by at night and he lived in town also.  I'd decided to stay here for a while in the midst of this trip to relax instead of moving around. In long hand, I got plenty of writing done. I'd been reading a lot on the trip as one does while traveling, but here I had a chance to just sink into a few things without any distractions at all. I remember calling my house and asking my mother if she could mail me down a few books I'd had on ice, so to speak, for years, waiting for the right time to read them.  I can't remember all the books I asked her to send me, but I know that two of them were Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Pet Sematary.  They came fast enough to the post office across the lake in the town of Panajachel, and sometime after that, figuring I had the perfect setting, alone, far off from others, in semi-woods, in a house surrounded by utter quiet at night, I started to read King's novel.

Mission accomplished. I'd gone out of my way to read the book in a place (and I did limit myself to reading the book at night there), that would make the reading as scary as possible, and the book delivered. For the few nights I took to read it, I'd close the book after a couple of hours, turn out my light, and then lay in that utter silence and darkness trying to get to sleep. I'd be eager to fall asleep, though it wasn't easy to do that, so I could wake up to sunshine and the return of general human activity.  And all day, until I finished it, I'd be thinking about the novel, looking forward to a night of intense reading ahead. It's a great horror novel, Pet Sematary, and I couldn't have had a more thoroughly enjoyable scary time reading it. 

What would you say is the best horror reading experience, all things considered -- the book, where you read it, what was going on in your life -- that you've had?