MARY ANN TAYLOR – Red Is for Shrouds. Raven House, paperback original, 1980.

   This second Raven House mystery is, if nothing else, a good sight better than the first, Crimes Past, by Mary Challis. (It was Jeff Meyerson, by the way, who was the first to suggest to me that “Mary Challis” is actually Sara Woods. The evidence is strongly convincing.)

   I haven’t heard of Mary Ann Taylor before now either — much of the Raven House line seems to consist of unknowns and/or writers hiding with obvious embarrassment under phony bylines.  In this particular case the author has a follow-up  out already (Return to Murder, Raven House #23). It also takes place in the small town of Bolton, exact location  unknown, but apparently somewhere in the western plains

   Police Chief Emil Martin puts his career on the line in this one. A series of murders has nearly wiped out the town’s population of red-haired women, and murder is a crime that Martin has hardly had much experience with. After a while the townspeople start getting antsy, and in a very real sense it is he who finds himself on trial.

   By category you’d have to call this a police procedural, but it’s a down-home folksy sort of one that big-city inhabitants aren’t going to enjoy and appreciate half as much as those with small-town roots. By nature, it’s also a puzzle story, and as such the surprise comes a bit at the expense of the characters as they’ve been constructed up to then — but only a bit.

   Good, wholesome mystery entertainment.

Rating: C plus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, July/August 1981.