Nell Fitzgerald was delighted with the lovingly stitched wedding quilt she received from her grandmother, Eleanor Cassidy. Nell’s joy evaporated when Ryan, her fiancé dropped the bombshell that he wasn’t ready to get married yet. Broken hearted, Nell decided to leave New York City for a week at her grandmother’s house in the quiet town of Archers Rest.
Eleanor owned a successful quilt shop that hosted weekly meetings of the Friday Night Quilt Club, a group of close friends united by their love of quilts and quilting. The closure of the local diner offers Eleanor the opportunity to expand her shop with the aid of handyman Marc Reed. Marc has a checkered reputation around Archers Rest but nothing bad enough to warrant being murdered with a pair of scissors. Suspicion quickly falls on Ryan who admitted to beating Marc after witnessing him sharing a quiet moment with Nell. With Eleanor’s pragmatic advice in the background, Nell begins helping the local hunky police chief track down the killer which could prove an easier task then straightening out her relationship problems.
The first of O’Donohue’s Someday Quilts series starts slow as the storyline, setting and characters are established. Little exciting happens during the first third of the book although the detailed character development is engaging enough and certainly, quilts play a big part in the story. For a small town, Eleanor’s quilt shop does an amazing amount of business, certainly more then any quilt shop this reviewer has visited. The murderer won’t be much of a surprise to perceptive mystery readers but is still an enjoyable, folksy read.
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