Product Description: Handicrafts are fast becoming a favorite American pasttime. Another, of course, is a good mystery. Combine the two and you have this delightfully different anthology on the art and craft of murder, in which the likes of knitting needles, handblown glass, wood files, and adhesives prove to be implements of a nastier sort of handiwork.
A Good Arrangement I'm not big on short mystery stories, mainly because the plot seems to be either way too thin to offer much intrigue, or way too complicated to be packed into a few thousand words. I was pleasantly surprised with Murder Most Crafty. Most of the stories were meaty enough to offer some level of speculation regarding "whodunit," while not too complicated to follow. I found some old favorites, as well as some new authors to check out - and the craft projects were an added plus.
A Mixed Bag of Suspense and Crafts "Murder Most Crafty" offers the reader 15 short stories which combine murder/suspense with a "craft" theme. Each short story is followed by a simple introductory project for the craft featured in the story. Crafts run the gamut from basket-making and fly-tying, to making paper by hand. As in any collection of stories, the quality of the stories varies widely. My favorites in the collection were "How to Make a Killing Online", by Victoria Houston, "The Deepest Blue" by Sujita Massey, and "The Collage to Kill for" by Susan Wittig Albert. In "How to Make A Killing Online", we meet a crafter of dry flies, Martha Estabrook, who gets mixed up with a online stalker. Ms. Houston is a new author for me, but this great story will certainly prompt me to check out her other books. "The Deepest Blue" features information on the Japanese method of dying indigo cloth, and was a well-told mystery. Ms. Albert's story "The Collage to Kill For" features her heroine China Bayles and was thoroughly enjoyable, especailly for fans of the China Bayles series. Other authors whose stories are in the collection are: Maggie Bruce, Jan Burke, Dorothy Cannell, Susan Dunlap, Monica Ferris and Denise Williams, Parnell Hall, Judith Kelman, Margaret Maron, Tim Myers, Sharan Newman, Gillian Roberts, and Paula Woods.
Many of the stories feature characters in existing series, which readers unfamiliar with the series might have trouble following. That is my main criticism of the book, that many of the tales were hard to appreciate if you aren't familiar with the author's stories. Still, if you are a fan of "hobby mysteries" you might enjoy discovering new authors featured in this book.
Too much crafts, not enough craft This is supposed to be a short-story murder-mystery anthology where all the stories have a "crafts" tie-in. Unfortunately, it serves as an excellent example of the things I find wrong with much of the current "hobby mysteries" craze.
There are 14 stories in the collection, all by authors with at least one professionally-published murder mystery to their name. Out of that 14, four aren't murder mysteries at all; they're descriptions of how the killer got away with it. Another is about a theft rather than a murder, but is otherwise competently written. Several of the stories veer sharply away from mystery and into horror; one of those has no sympathetic character anywhere in the story, and its ending is so ambiguous as to go well beyond "making the reader think" and over into "making the reader say, 'What the fleep is supposed to have happened here?'" And one story telegraphs its ending in the second scene, then proceeds straight to said ending without even the courtesy to the reader of a single red herring -- "mystery" on the fourth-grade reading level.
The important thing about each and every one of these stories isn't the mystery; it's the craft-project instructions at the end. And you can tell which of the authors cared enough about their readers to come up with a reasonably well-crafted mystery as well as a craft project, and which ones just dashed off the first idea with a crafts connection that came into their heads, took the check, and ran.
I might look into the series novels by a couple of the listed authors, but this book is going straight into the cull box for the secondhand store. Which is where I suggest you look for it, especially if you like to play with the project instructions in hobby-mystery books, because they're pretty clearly the part the writers and the editor spent the most effort on.
superb anthology Though technological advances have made mass production not only much easier but customized so the phenomena of craft shops and shows around the country might seem like an anachronism but remain very popular. This fifteen short story collection anthology adds murders as the extra ingredient in the artistic crafts. The tales are top rate with each hooking the audience (and not just because the star is making a rug) as the reader seeks the pattern to the homicide. Fan favorites include China Bayles, Lili Marino, Betsy Devonshire, Rei Shimura, Catherine Levendeuer, etc. In other words, some of the craftier series sleuths star in these shorts. Each author provides a craft tip, but what make MURDER MOST CRAFTY worth reading are the latest appearances of some of our favorite detectives starring in fine tales.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
