Home Sweet Homicide
Summary:
Unoccupied and unsupervised while mother is working, the children of widowed crime writer Marion Carstairs find diversion wherever they can. So when the kids hear gunshots at the house next door, they jump at the chance to launch their own amateur investigation—and after all, why shouldn’t they? They know everything the cops do about crime scenes, having read about them in mother’s writing. They know what literary detectives Bill Smith and Don Drexel would do in such a situation, how they would interpret the clues and handle witnesses; they certainly wouldn’t shy away from a case that involved a famous actress, a beleaguered husband, and a clever French artist. Plus, if the children solve the puzzle before the cops, it will do wonders for the sales of mother’s novels.
But this crime scene isn’t a game at all; the murder is real, and when its details prove more twisted than anything in mother’s fiction, they’ll have to enlist Marion’s help to sort them out. Or is that just part of their plan to hook her up with the lead detective on the case?
Group Comments:
The slang was really hard to figure out.
This was very hard to get into.
Who was the target audience for this book? The jargon-odd, and just very random.
Story layers were interesting, but I had to gloss over the kid’s parts.
It was like watching a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movie!
The happy ending fit with the time frame of being from an era when people wanted a break from gritty reality.
Amusing, funny, lighthearted. Very much of its time.
Once I got into it I enjoyed it. I felt like it was based on a child’s perspective of what mystery fiction is like.
I enjoyed it; I liked how the kids took the mystery fiction tropes and based their investigation on that.
Liked the set up (and secret language) but it started getting tiresome. There just wasn’t enough to move it forward.
Reminded me of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
Liked how the children were empowered.
The mystery was “nice,” but too much back story about the “meddling kids,” it needed more focus on the mystery.
Took me a while to get into it.
I really liked it. Thumbs up. I liked the back story and appreciated the happy ending.
