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Review: Monkey Wrench by Terri Thayer

Title:  Monkey Wrench
Author:  Terri Thayer
Genre:  Cozy Mystery
Pages:  288
Published:  May 2012
Publisher:  Midnight Ink
Source:  NetGalley
Where to buy:  Amazon

Synopsis:

A new pattern in our popular quilting mystery series

With two weeks left before the annual Quilters Crawl, Dewey Pellicano is excited to showcase her quilt shop after a four-year absence from the crawl. Quilters from all over visit as many quilting shops as they can within a short time. But Dewey's giveaway planning and Twitter promotion are cut short when her assistant manager, Vangie, is implicated in her boyfriend's untimely demise following a protest against a campus drug bust. 

I have to admit, I’m a total sucker for a quilting or knitting based novel.  Especially those that are part of a series – after all I own every one of the Elm Creek Quilter’s novels – so this for me wasn’t a question of whether I’d like the book but rather how much was I going to love it.  And I was right, I did love this book!

Dewey is the owner of great quilting shop, one of the many who are participating on the annual Quilters Crawl.  At each shop the participants will be making a quilt square, entering giveaways and meeting lots of other quilters.  With the help of Vangie, Dewey has come up with great concept to incorporate social media into the Crawl.  By promoting each shop on Twitter they are going to encourage people to converge on one store each day.  Unfortunately nothing goes right and chaos ensues.

Vangie and her boyfriend are caught up in a protest – one he actually started!  Dewey stumbles onto them at the campus and tries to talk Vangie out of getting involved.  One thing leads to another and poor Vangie is caught up in a death, a drug bust and piles of trouble.  Dewey steps in to try and help, but manages to get herself in the crosshairs of an overeager detective.  Even with the help of her boyfriend, things don’t seem to be going as smoothly as she hopes.

When I initially picked up this book, I didn’t realize it was part of a series.  But I got the feeling from a few comments throughout the story it wasn’t the first time Dewey’s been caught up with the law and isn’t a stranger to dead bodies.  I’m curious now what happened in the past and will have to pick up the rest of the series to see what happened.  I enjoyed the interaction between the characters and how they did or didn’t get along.  There were a few laugh out loud moments with comments by a few characters.

Will I recommend this to anyone?  Most definitely, for anyone who loves cozy mysteries this is one that should be added to your list.  As well, anyone that loves quilting based novels!  Will I read more by this author?  Yes!  I’m already on the hunt for the rest of this series and other novels.  She’s been added to my auto-buy list!

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