Hardcover, published July 2014, Minotaur, (St Martin’s.)
This is the 17th in the ‘Meg Langslow’ series and as good and as funny as ever. I first ran across this series with the fourth book ‘Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos.’ I brought it because it had RPGs in it, (er no, not rocket-propelled grenades -but role-playing games) and I thought that looked interesting. It was, and I shot out to buy the previous three, then all the others in the series as they appeared. I’ve happily followed Meg through her blacksmithing career, her meeting with the man working in the bridal-wear shop, to her engagement, marriage, and production of twins. I love her eccentric family, the weird things that happen around her, and some of her coping mechanisms. So this is more of that and I have the next book already on order and prepaid – The Nightingale Before Christmas – I don’t want to miss out.
Meg’s father had always wondered who his parents were. He was found abandoned in a library, and a several books earlier his father finally appeared. But what of his mother and the circumstances in which Doctor Langslow had been abandoned? P.I. Stanley Denton, hired to find the missing mother has discovered who she was and surprise, surprise, she has lived much of her life only an hour’s drive away from the Langslow family. Then the bad news, Cordelia is dead – and her cousin insists that it was murder. Meg and Stanley set out for Riverton to dicover the truth about her grandmother’s demise, and with them go a convoy of volunteers led by Meg’s grandfather, a well-known wildlife preservationist. However grandfather Blake and the volunteers aren’t there to assist in solving the mystery, they’re in hot pursuit of a number of feral emus around Riverton, which were released by their bankrupt owner. How the emus fare, how Meg finds the truth about Cordelia’s death, and how she discovers just who is behind more deaths and skullduggery, makes a very funny and entertaining story. Recommended.