Sunday, January 17, 2010

Review: The Body in the Cast

Author: Katherine Hall Page

Format: 275 pages, hardback
Characters: Faith Fairchild, Penny Bartlett, Tom Fairchild
Subject: murder, catering, movie making
Setting: fictional town of Aleford, Massachusetts
Series: Faith Fairchild Mysteries
Genre: mystery- amateur sleuth
Source: public library


A well-developed mystery featuring amateur sleuth, Faith Fairchild.  This is the fifth in the series, but the first I have read.  Although there are references to previous episodes, the story stands alone quite well.

Faith Fairchild, married to the local minister, mother of two pre-schoolers, runs a catering business "Have Faith."  She is hired to provide food to the cast and crew of a big Hollywood movie being filmed in their small town outside of Boston. The film is to be a modern take on The Scarlett Letter. At the same time, the town is having an election with an unheard slate of three people running for one vacancy on the town select board.  One of the candidates is royally detested by most people in town.

As the filming begins, bodies start turning up, discovered by Faith.  Her black bean soup seems to be the culprit in a mass food poisoning that hits the entire crew. And everytime these incidents occur, filming must be delayed, and the director goes into a frenzy over his budget.

There is a cast of typical hollywood divas, under-appreciated crew members, spoiled children, all harboring enough secrets to keep NSA busy decoding for a year.

I enjoyed this book and will certainly look for at least one more in the series.  Faith seems to be a tick above the standard amateur sleuth.  She is helpful, thoughtful and quite intuitive, but does not strike off on her own, put herself in danger, or forget to involve the local police.  A thoroughly pleasant book with the added feature of recipes for several of the offerings from "Have Faith" catering.






Challenges: Audio Books, Thrillers-Suspense-Mystery,  Support Your Local library,

2 comments:

  1. Happy New Year, New England Bloggers!

    Our 1-year anniversary is coming up Jan 27. To mark the occasion I am going to put up a Mr. Linky on the evening of Mon, Jan 25. If you'd like to write a post about living in NE, your favorite places to visit, NE authors or books, whatever interests you. I'd also like a little idea of # of participants, if you could just send me a reply.
    I apologize if you are getting this twice. Many people haven't given me emails so I have to leave it in the comments.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am always seeing reviews of her books around blogland but I have not read any of them. She is another on the list I will check out someday soon.

    ReplyDelete

Welcome, thanks for stopping by. Now that you've heard our two cents, perhaps you have a few pennies to throw into the discussion. Due to a bunch more anonymous spam getting through, I've had to disallow anonymous comments. I try to respond to all comments posing a question, but may not always get to you right away.