Comments for Sign of Foul Play

Sign of Foul Play: 09/03/14

Sign of Foul Play by Penny Warner is the second of the Connor Westphal mysteries. Connor is settling into her job as the owner of the weekly newspaper in Flat Skunk. A grizzly death of man at a construction sight puts her paper and the bigger daily paper of the next door town in a race to scoop each other.

The man's death brings to light problems with the construction company and quite possibly the construction site. Now rebar, deeply dug foundations, and all the other stuff that goes with building a multistory structure says to me, big, urban area. Flat Skunk in no other book I've read is described as being big enough to need this size of a building. So I had to wonder if the construction company was trying to go out of business and abscond with the venture capital.

No. The construction goofiness is just goofiness. The plot instead is a mixture books from Diane Mott Davidson's series. I think these similarities are a product of both authors being of the same generation, and thus pulling from similar lifetime sources. But it did make solving the crime very easy; something I did by about the halfway point.

My final thought, though, is that I'd love to revisit Connor in new mystery. Her deafness, while not the main point, is an interesting side note to all the books. She often comments on the technology and techniques she uses to live her life and communicate with her hearing neighbors. I just wonder if cell phone saturation and texting would have made things a little easier for her.

Four stars

Comments (0)