Virtual Tour for Maggie Dove by Susan Breen

Welcome to my stop on the Virtual Tour, presented by Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours, for Maggie Dove by Susan Breen.  Please leave a comment or question for Susan to let her know you stopped by.  You may follow all of the stops on the tour by clicking on the banner above.  

Maggie Dove: A Mystery

By Susan Breen

Maggie Dove, Book 1

Publisher:  Alibi (An Imprint of PenguinRandomHouse)

Release Date: June 14, 2016

Genre: Amateur Sleuth/Female Sleuth/Cozy Mystery

Format: eBook

Length: 225 Pages

ISBN: 9780399594892

ASIN: B018CHA26O

Buy Links:  Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | Random House

About the book:

Susan Breen introduces a charming new series heroine in this poignant and absorbing cozy mystery with a bite. Maggie Dove thinks everyone in her small Westchester County community knows everyone else’s secrets. Then murder comes to town.

When Sunday School teacher Maggie Dove finds her hateful next-door neighbor Marcus Bender lying dead under her beloved oak tree—the one he demanded she cut down—she figures the man dropped dead of a mean heart. But Marcus was murdered, and the prime suspect is a young man Maggie loves like a son. Peter Nelson was the worst of Maggie’s Sunday School students; he was also her late daughter’s fiancé, and he’s been a devoted friend to Maggie in the years since her daughter’s death.

Maggie can’t lose Peter, too. So she sets out to find the real murderer. To do that, she must move past the grief that has immobilized her all these years. She must probe the hidden corners of her little village on the Hudson River. And, when another death strikes even closer to home, Maggie must find the courage to defend the people and the town she loves—even if it kills her.

About The Author:

Susan Breen is the author of The Fiction Class, her debut novel that won the Washington Irving Book Award. Her stories and articles have appeared in many magazines, among them The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Compose, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. She teaches at Gotham Writers in Manhattan; is on the faculty of the New York Pitch Conference, South Carolina Writers Workshop, and the Women’s National Book Association; and is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters-in-Crime. Breen lives in a small village on the Hudson River with her husband, two dogs, and one cat. Her three children are flourishing elsewhere.

Webpage: http://www.susanjbreen.com/about.htm  

An oak tree, a dead neighbor and a small town full of secrets take center stage in Susan Breen’s new cozy mystery, Maggie Dove.  Set in a small Westchester County community, where residents can look down the Hudson River to where the Twin Towers stood, this cozy is full of colorful characters, an elderly heroine and plenty of emotional angst.  If you’re looking for a new cozy to read, you’ll want to give Maggie Dove a try.

Ms. Breen did a good job introducing Maggie Dove, the sixtyish central character of the story, right from the start.  A mystery writer who “retired” when both her husband and only child, a daughter, passed away within 12 months of each other, Maggie has lived in the same house and town almost her whole life.  When a new neighbor, from out of town, requests she cut down the oak tree in her yard so he can have a better view of the river, Maggie emphatically says no.  While Maggie is mostly a nice person and very agreeable, she has an emotional attachment to that tree and nothing is going to get her to cut it down.  Not even when that neighbor winds up dead under that tree.  As Maggie tries to figure out what happened to her neighbor, and why he was on her lawn, she discovers that not everything is quite as it seems in her small town and finds herself drawn into a murder investigation. 

The secondary characters are also well developed and I enjoyed getting to know Peter, the young man who Maggie always thought would end up being her son in law, and her best friend Winifred, who has problems of her own and almost always challenges Maggie's viewpoints.  The people in her small town provide a lot of color, secrets and potential suspects.  Turns out there were plenty of people who wanted her neighbor gone or dead.

The mystery is well written and takes several twists and turns.  Just when I thought I might know the identity of the killer, Ms. Breen threw in a twist to make me change my mind.  The story’s pace is fairly even, though the story does begin very slowly, and I enjoyed Ms. Breen’s voice as an author.  My only complaint was that I thought Maggie seemed to “wallow” in her grieving process, which was way too long, it was perhaps just a bit too much emotional angst in my opinion.

Will Maggie discover who really killed her neighbor and why?  Will she be able to save Peter from his self-destructive behavior?  And just how many people will the killer manage to kill before Maggie discover their identity?  You’ll have to read Maggie Dove to find out.  I enjoyed it and can’t wait to read the next book in this series, Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency, which will be released later this fall.

My Rating:  4 out of 5 Crowns