Beware False Profits
Emilie Richards
Berkley, Nov 2007, $6.99
ISBN: 9780425218686
Aggie Sloan-Wilcox is the wife of Pastor Ed Wilcox of the Unitarian-Universal Church in Emerald Springs, Ohio; the beautiful serene town offers little peace to the Wilcox. There house is crowded because her mother lives with them until her Victorian house is renovated into a combination home and crafts shop.
Needing some romance in their lives, they go to New York City where they get a call from parishioner Mara Wagner who tells them her spouse Joe never came home from his monthly business trip. A clue leads Aggie and Ed to the Pussycat Club where they learn that Ed’s “business” is dressing up in women’s garb to perform on stage as a female impersonator. At a fund raiser to benefit a charity that Joe runs, his nemesis Hazel Kefauver keels over and dies. Later they find out she was poisoned; Aggie believes there is a link between the murder and the disappearance. While trying to discover who killed Hazel and where Joe is, Aggie looks for the church’s’ valuable antique punch bowl that she lost and is trying to learn the identity of the carpenter working at her mom’s new home.
Fans of intelligently constructed cozies will thoroughly enjoy BEWARE FALSE PROFITS. The heroine seems so natural as a sleuth that the audience will find her investigations believable and think she would make a good police detective though she is an amateur. Although Aggie is a minister’s wife, she defies the stereotypes because of her independence to do what she believes is the right thing even if that means swimming upstream against a current of parishioners, her spouse and a cop. She makes this a fine small town Midwest mystery.
Harriet Klausner
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