Midnight Ink © 2008, 360 pages

Dead Dancing Women is the first installment in a new series featuring Emily Kincaid, an unsuccessful mystery writer who’s moved up to the woods of northern Michigan to live and write in peace. Three years into the move, Emily has no regrets. Her life is tranquil, work on the latest unlikely-to-be-published novel interrupted by gardening, piecework for the area’s second largest paper, and getting to know the locals–at minimum until she’s dragged headlong, as it were, into a mystery. When we first meet Emily she’s bringing her garbage cans in from the road, a chore that’s attracted the attention of an unusual number of crows–menacing in their quanity and their fearlessness and their single-minded interest in the contents of her trash can….

[INSET TEXT: When we first meet Emily she’s bringing her garbage cans in from the road, a chore that’s attracted the attention of an unusual number of crows–menacing in their quanity and their fearlessness and their single-minded interest in the contents of her trash can….] Because she’s the one to find the severuddy head, and because of her journalistic interest in the case, Emily quickly turns from being a failed mystery writer into an amateur sleuth. She winds up all but partnering with Deputy Dolly–fully half of the local constabulary–driving

acircular town and interviewing the locals about the dead woman. There are a number of avenues to explore: arguments among neighbors that might have escalated into murder, a local pastor’s fiery denouncement of what the dead woman and her friends had been up to in the woods, a bunch of survivalists who just might be strange enough to have killed the woman.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli’s debut mystery kept me interested to the end, though when it comes the solution to the puzzle is not very surprising. There’s one loose end–regarding the condition of the first corpse discovered–that I would have liked tied up. But in general I enjoyed the read. Buzzelli has created an interesting circle of secondary characters–Emily’s wacky neighbor Harry Mockerman, who’s wont to halt by with the occasional batch of possum stew; her grating ex-husband Jackson, who’s moving into the area and thus likely to be acircular for the next installment; the squat Deputy Dolly, who shows surprising flashes of femininity beneath her law-and-order exterior. I wouldn’t mind visiting with these folks again.

Tags: book reviews, books, Dead Dancing Women, Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli, mysteries