Damsels in Distress

A Renaissance Fair is coming to the relatively quiet college town of Farberville Arkansas, which is not the sort of news that usually sets local bookseller Claire Malloy’s heart racing.  But with Caron, Claire’s perpetually petulant teenage daughter, being pulled into volunteering (or face the horror of doing homework over the summer) and her fiancé, Police Lieutenant Peter Rosen, away, Claire finds herself drawn into the strange inner workings of the group putting on the fair.     But just as Claire has decided that her time might be better spent fretting over the details of her upcoming nuptials, one of the volunteers helping with the Ren Fair falls victim to arson, her body found burned in the wreckage of her rented home. Even stranger, none of the members of the local chapter of The Association for Renaissance Scholarship and Enlightenment (ARSE) – the group putting on Farberville’s first RenFair – had ever met the woman in the flesh and can’t provide any information about who she is and where she came from.  However, someone is definitely dead and the fire looks very suspicious – but is it murder?  When the fair opens, tensions expose the dark secrets and malevolent schemes that lurk beneath the superficial congeniality of the ARSE members.  The lords are leaping, the ladies are lying, and the knights are fighting--while someone is committing murder most heinous.  And with Claire’s dreams of a blissful wedding hanging in the balance, she has no choice left but to fling herself into the battle and match wits with the killer…From Publishers WeeklyIn bookseller Claire Malloy's sprightly 16th outing (after 2006's The Goodbye Body), a Renaissance fair descends on Farberville, Ark. Claire, nervously contemplating her imminent marriage to police detective Peter Rosen, finds plenty of distraction when Edward Cobbinwood, a member of the Renaissance fair group, confides that he has come to Farberville in search of his long-lost father. Fearing that her late, unlamented husband, Carlton, was Edward's father, Claire spends time with the fair's organizers, hoping to discover the truth. A house fire claims the life of a mysterious woman named Angie, and the subsequent murder of a talented artist complicates everything. Nimbly sidestepping official attempts to keep her out of the case, Claire, as always, fingers the culprit, this time in a denouement worthy of Dame Agatha herself. Though this installment isn't up to the high standard of The Goodbye Body, Hess fans will find much to entertain them while eagerly anticipating Claire's wedded bliss in upcoming episodes. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistArkansas bookseller Claire Molloy, who spends as much time solving crimes as she does selling books, finds herself in yet another tricky predicament. The organizers of a renaissance fair have enlisted Claire's help, but that's before she stumbles on a dead body, burned beyond recognition. It's hard to concentrate on fairs when you're trying to identify a dead woman and determine if she was murdered. The Molloy novels are plain Janes compared to the flamboyant plots and homespun humor in Hess' other series, starring Sheriff Arly Hanks. But for those who prefer the comforts of formula and a just-plain-nice heroine, Claire Malloy does just fine. David PittCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved