One of the most amusing skills of Donna Andrews is her cleverness with titles. All 30 Meg Langslow mysteries have bird puns. My favorites are still: ”We’ll Aways Have Parrots” and “Terns of Endearment.” This title is a little different. Here we have a pun on the wildly successful TV show “Murder, She Wrote,” and oddly enough this novel has very little to do with birders—although there is a good deal about the bullying behavior of some male hummingbirds. It does however remind one of the perennial witticisms about the Angela Lansbury series: there are so many corpses, soon there will be no people left alive in Cabot’s Cove. Andrews knows this is also a witticism leveled at her Shenandoah Valley setting, Caerphilly, Virginia.
Murder mysteries these days are not content to have a crime and a solution. There must be social commentary on contemporary issues. This volume does not deal with racism or domestic abuse and, mercifully, does not preach, but we learn a lot about the perils of invasive species, the dangers of insecticide, the importance of pollinators. Also, a newer twist; the amateur sleuth is working with the police, not secretly or in opposition. (In England, for reasons of their own, the sleuth is often clergy: Sister Boniface, Father Brown, and in “Grantchester” Rev. Will Davenport.)
Meg Langslow has been unofficially assigned to deal with the newcomers to Caerphilly, the Westlakers. These affluent refugees from the city thought they wanted country life, but they hate animals, animal manure and the sight of pigs in the nearby fields. They craved, perhaps, simpler living but have built McMansions, monstrous houses, almost all in imitation of some once pleasing architectural style. There are faux colonials, faux Tudors, and so on. They have had their lawns brought in by truck or they’ve paved over the land in huge, complicated stone patios, and they complain about everything. The natives call them the Westlake NIMBYs—not in my back yard.
Walter Inman, known by locals as Wally the Weird, has been complaining vociferously about Edgar Bortnick and his beehives. Wally is an unpleasant fellow, and, in this series, if we meet an unpleasant fellow early on, he is a dead man. Edgar’s beehives are attacked and Wally’s body is found by chance, in the woods while Meg and others are on an expedition with Deacon Washington, searching for a lost African American cemetery. Did Edgar kill Wally in revenge? Where is Edgar?
Simultaneously, Meg’s grandmother, Cordelia, is being “profiled” by a young writer, Britni Colleton, from the magazine “Sweet Tea and Sassafras,” a frothy and useless Southern culture magazine. There is merriment here. Meg organizes her forces—that is, her extensive family and sleuths, laying a complicated trap for the killer: a sting. Get it? Meg will get into danger and get out, and this undeniably pleasing series will soar, glide, fly on.
