MARY DAHEIM – Just Desserts.

Avon, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1991. Reprinted many times; a later cover is shown.

   Another first novel, so far as I know [it was], and like Gloria White’s Murder on the Run (reviewed here earlier), one that takes place in contemporary California. Other than that, the difference between this book and the other is nearly without measure.

   So that you should not get me wrong, each book has a heroine rather than a hero, but where PI Ronnie Ventura is almost as tough as the guys she hangs out with, Judith Grover McGonigle is a widow trying to make ends meet with a newly established Bed-and-Breakfast in her home, and she and her cousin Renie are both as suburbanly house-wifey as they come.

   And when a family of wacky eccentrics descends on her house (while their own is being fumigated), and when the murder of a charlatan fortune-teller occurs the same evening the contents of a will are going to be disclosed, and when the investigating officer turns out to be Joe Flynn, an old beau who mysteriously disappeared on Judith 25 years ago, why then, you might get the idea you’ve read all this before.

   The clutter and clamor do not die down for an instant. Everybody seems to have known or have been related to the dead woman some time or another, and everyone appears to have a motive. None of it seems to matter, though. Nobody seems to care very much, though they say they do, or maybe it was just me.

   I also found it difficult enough to keep all the names straight, much less worry about small things like why the police let everyone roam all around the house, inside and out, and how the neighbors manage to pop in and out with important evidence without anyone being aware of it.

   There is a small mystery about Joe Flynn’s marriage and impending annulment, and somewhere between pages 101 and 102 something seems to have gotten terribly garbled, as though somebody left out several pages of text. In all the confusion that is supposed to pass for mysterious happenings, I guess not even whoever was supposed to have edited this book happened to notice.

   Let me leave you with this small quote from the end of the book (page 203). It will tell you as best as I could otherwise where a sizable part of Judith McGonigle’s mind is really at:

[UPDATE] 01-13-09. From 1983 through 1992, Mary Daheim wrote historical romances, seven in all, but her career as a writer didn’t really begin until she switched to writing mysteries in 1991 with Just Desserts.

In spite of my reservations about the book, it has struck a chord with a sizable segment of the mystery reading population. There are now 25 books in the series, either published or forthcoming

   That’s more than a book a year, on the average — work out the math — but in the same time period, Mary Daheim has written 21 books in yet another series, this one the Emma Lord mysteries, beginning with The Alpine Advocate in 1992. (The title refers to the newspaper that Emma Lord publishes and edits in a small town in Washington state.)

   But getting back to Judith McGonigle, rather than put the inevitable off any longer, by Dune to Death, the fourth book in the series, she’d married Joe Flynn, and all of their subsequent adventures were as husband and wife. (Seeing that she had a good thing going, she didn’t give up the Bed-and-Breakfast, though.)