Shadow of a Spout: 04/05/25

Shadow of a Spout by Amanda Cooper (2015) is the second of the Teapot Collector mysteries. This one is set at a teapot collecting convention. That means Rose and her buddies are staying at a small hotel near the event. Rose wants the International Teapot Collector’s Society president to assess her old silver/copper Chinese tea kettle. Unfortunately the president is rude to her and is later murdered with the very same piece.

Conventions do not lend themselves to murder mysteries. Sure they get everyone out of their usual surrounds and they create a locked room / remote mansion type mystery setting but they also severely limit the possibilities of who can have committed the murder while creating a location that is naturally boring for it's remoteness and limited focused.

In this case, having the murder weapon be in the locked room of a eight-two year old woman limits the possibilities even further. Either she did it or hotel staff did it.

This particular volume despite being short was also incredibly slow and boring. Rather than give Rose and her friends the agency to solve the mystery on their own, the book choses to switch points of view every so often to Sophie, Rose's adult grand-daughter. If she is the one who should be solving the case from the get-go, find some excuse to have her go with her grandmother.

Long story short, this particular mystery took about fifty pages to solve and wasn't entertaining enough to read the rest of it.

The last book in the series is The Grim Steeper (2016).

Two stars

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