Sew Very Good!

Bad pun! But I love puns, the "badder," the better. And the first three novels in Terri Thayer's Quilting Mystery series are all "sew" good! (You can read her blog at Killer Hobbies.)  I loved each and every one of them! Hated to see the last one end and can't wait for the next one to come out. I may just have to pay full price for it. That's high praise from Ms. Penny Pincher here. Normally I would wait until I could get the book via PaperBack Swap or at least from the library. But I don't think I can wait that long to read the next in the series. I'll have to, however, since it won't be released until after Christmas. The good news, though, is that I can pre-order Monkey Wrench from Amazon. I put it on my Christmas wish list there. Here's hoping Santa pays attention.

I had heard such good things about the Quilting Mystery series that I was willing to wait for a very long time to get them from PaperBack Swap. I put the first three books on my wish list and eventually my wishes were granted, although they didn't get to me in the order in which they were published. I put them in my towering TBR pile and only recently got around to reading them. I decided that since I finally had all three, I would just read them one after the other. I like reading series books in the proper order. Most of the time, the individual books stand alone, as these did, but reading them in order does make certain aspects of character development and back story make a bit more sense. And that was the case with these books, too, but reading them in order is more satisfying to me. And I liked being able to read one immediately after the other. That's not always possible when you read the books as they are published, obviously.  I frequently forget key elements in the back stories of the characters.

In Wild Goose Chase, Dewey Pellicano is attending her first quilt conference since inheriting her mother's quilt shop. Before her mother's sudden death, Dewey worked with computers. But when the economy went bust, Dewey found herself unemployed. Mom to the rescue with a job offer--work for Quilter Paradiso setting up a computerized accounting and inventory control program, something right up Dewey's alley. But her career plans are changed when her mom is killed by a hit and run drunk driver. Dewey inherits the shop and is trying her best to learn more than she had ever planned to about running her own small business and the art of quilting. To make matters more difficult, Terri's sister-in-law Kym does her best to undermine Dewey at every turn, starting with sabotaging the computerized sales program on the very first day of the quilt conference. Matters get more complicated when Dewey finds famous quilt artist Claire Armstrong dead, killed with one of those deadly rotary cutters. And more complicated when she falls in love with former childhood friend turned hunky cop, Buster Healy. Healy is helping investigate Armstrong's murder, a complication for their budding romance. When Dewey stumbles upon a second body, Dewey feels compelled to hurry and find the murderer before anyone else winds up dead.