I'm pleased to welcome Lois Winston and her new release. I love the cover of this book! It's going on my TBR list.
An Anastasia Pollack
Crafting Mystery, Book 5
The
adventures of reluctant amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack continue in
A Stitch to Die For,
the 5th book in the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series by USA
Today bestselling author
Lois Winston.
Ever
since her husband died and left her in debt equal to the gross
national product of Uzbekistan, magazine crafts editor and reluctant
amateur sleuth Anastasia Pollack has stumbled across one dead body
after another—but always in work-related settings. When a killer
targets the elderly nasty neighbor who lives across the street from
her, murder strikes too close to home. Couple that with a series of
unsettling events days before Halloween, and Anastasia begins to
wonder if someone is sending her a deadly message.
Excerpt
After
nearly an hour of battling rush hour traffic, I finally arrived home,
relieved to find neither Ira’s van nor Lawrence’s car parked at
the curb. After last night’s chaos, I looked forward to a
relatively peaceful dinner—relatively
being the operative word. After all, I never knew what to expect from
my mother-in-law.
However,
as I turned to head into the house, an unexpected shaft of bright
light caught my eye. Across the street, Betty Bentworth’s door
stood half ajar, the glow from her foyer chandelier spilling out onto
her front porch.
Betty—otherwise
known as Batty Bentworth—spent her life seated in front of her
living room window where she spied on her neighbors. She kept the
Westfield police on speed dial, often calling multiple times a day to
complain about anything and everything, once even demanding the
arrest of her six-year-old next-door neighbor for vandalism. The
child’s crime? She’d drawn a chalk hopscotch board on the
sidewalk in front of Betty’s house.
Batty
Bentworth was not someone who left her front door open—especially
after dark.
Like
everyone else in the neighborhood, I kept my distance from Mrs.
Bentworth. You never knew what would set her off, and it was best not
to get on her bad side. Not that she had a good side from what I knew
of her.
Still,
I couldn’t ignore that open door. Rather than head across the
street, I decided to call her. Maybe she’d gone out earlier to
retrieve her mail, and the door hadn’t latched completely when she
returned. The stiff October breeze blowing down the street may have
pushed the door open.
I
whipped out my cell phone, scrolled to her number, and placed the
call. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. After a dozen rings I hung
up, sighed, and reluctantly crossed the street.
“Hello?
Mrs. Bentworth?” I called through the open door. No answer. I
shouted her name. “Mrs. Bentworth!” Only the sound of the six
o’clock news blaring from her television greeted me.
I
stepped inside and shouted above the Eyewitness News reporter. “Mrs.
Bentworth! It’s Anastasia Pollack. Your front door is open.”
A
sense of déjà vu washed over me. Less than two weeks earlier I’d
discovered Rosalie Schneider, another elderly neighbor, unconscious
at the bottom of her basement stairs. I took a few steps into the
foyer and turned toward the dimly lit living room. Batty Bentworth
sat on her sofa, a multi-colored crocheted granny square afghan
draped across her lap, her gaze fixated on the news broadcasting from
an old black and white console television set.
“Mrs.
Bentworth, didn’t you hear me?”
When
she didn’t respond, I stepped between her and the television. She
continued to ignore me, but now I knew why. Batty Bentworth was
dead—but not from natural causes.
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