Sticks and Scones

By Diane Mott Davidson

Goldy is a caterer and she has landed a three part job with the man who owns Hyde Castle. This fellow, who inherited the castle, wants all three meals to feature Elizabethan-era types of food. The castle was brought over from England and reassembled in Colorado. The owner, Eliot Hyde, has been renovating the castle with a view to converting it to a conference center. The three catered events are designed to highlight the castle and its amenities, so it is very important that all goes smoothly.
But a few hours before the first event, Goldy wakes up to a suspicious noise. Just as she is going to get out of bed to investigate, the front window of her house is shot out. The police are called and an investigation begins.
Goldy's husband, who is a cop, is out of town. He returns the next day and joins Goldy at the castle chapel just in time to get shot by an unknown assailant minutes after Goldy finds the body of a young man in the creek near the chapel. Tom, the husband, is helicoptered to the hospital with a serious but not fatal wound. Eliot lets Goldy, Tom and Goldy's son move into the castle until their window can be fixed. Goldy finds that she left her disk with her recipes at the house and goes back, alone, to retrieve them, where she is, not surprisingly, bonked on the head by a thief stealing their computers.
Tom is investigating a the theft of a valuable shipment of stamps in which the delivery driver was murdered. The young man whose body was in the creek was part of that robbery. Since Tom in incapacitated, Goldy sort of takes over the investigation which seems to be linked not only to the castle and its chapel, but also to Goldy's ex-husband, recently released from prison and now hooked up with a woman who was dating one of the men involved in the stamp robbery.

This was an okay read. It seemed very contrived to me. Too many people tied to too many other people in such a small location. And that whole secret love child part of the plot was just silly and unbelievable.
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