Book Review: The Quick and the Thread

The Quick and the Thread by Amanda Lee is the first in “The Embroidery Mystery” series. This is an important point for me since from the first page I fell in love with the book.

Marcy Singer is a frustrated and somewhat bored accountant in San Francisco who, at the urging of her former college roommate, packs up her things, her dog Angus, and moves north to the quaint little town of Tallulah Falls on the Oregon coast to open an embroidery shop. It seems like a dream come true, until the morning after the grand opening party when she finds the shops former tenant dead on her storeroom floor, a cryptic message scratched into the wall with a tapestry needle beside him.

If that wasn’t enough, the landlord who rented to both of them is soon murdered and Marcy, fearful of being either the next victim or looked at as a suspect, is determined to discover who and what is going on in her new hometown.

Ms. Lee is a wonderful writer; her style is not heavy handed and her prose is lively and quick. A cozy mystery, by definition, is supposed to be fun with a solid mystery in the middle of it. This is not a hard core detective story; the heroine/hero has a life and has just landed in the middle of something they need to solve. The Quick and the Thread is just about as perfect a cozy as I could order.

Ms. Lee is an old film/television buff, and the story is sprinkled with references to and mentions of a wide variety of shows. I particularly liked her offhand referral to Mrs. Danvers (a nod to both DuMauier’s novel and Judith Anderson’s portrayal).

There is humor, romance, quarrels between friends, a heroine in peril, and of course, the requisite sleuthing that Marcy must do in order to figure out “who done it.” All in all, it’s a great romp and I highly recommend adding this book to your to-read list. The next book in the series, Stitch Me Deadly came out the first of this month and I’m looking forward to the third installment already!