Donnelly, Deborah: May the Best Man Die

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Seattle-based wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid has a lot on her plate. Dry rot has forced a temporary evacuation of her home and office, a rented houseboat moored on the east shore of Washington's Lake Union, and from her interim quarters she is overseeing the final preparations for two end-of-year nuptials. Preparations for the Buckmeister/Frost Christmas Eve wedding aren't unusually problematic, but the blowout Carnegie's planning for New Year's Eve proves to be a trial. For one thing, bride-to-be Sally Tyler--the daughter of renowned conductor Charles Tyler and his superstar CEO wife Ivy--is a spoiled rich girl with the people skills to match. For another, the groom's disagreeable best man turns up dead the morning after the bachelor party, and Carnegie--spying on the debauch for her own reasons through a pair of binoculars--may have witnessed the prelude to his murder.

May the Best Man Die is the third book in Deborah Donnelly's series of Wedding Planner Mysteries. (I have not read the first two books in the series but plan to remedy that fault.) It's a tightly-plotted mystery with a likable protagonist and good, breezy writing: "So, roundly cursing Ms. Tyler and the stack of wedding magazines she rode in on, I climbed into my van [the Vanna White Too, by the way] and drove south." Readers looking for a quick, well-written cozy will find Donnelly's series delightful.

Comments

[Jessie]

1.

This sounds brilliant!

Looking at her other books - she seems to like 'death' or 'kill' in her title. Makes me wonder if her style is formulaic across the 3...

[Debra Hamel]

2.

Well, they are mysteries involving murders, so the titles are scarcely surprising. Besides, mystery writers tend to have that sort of continuity in their titles.