Review of Candy Corn Murder by Leslie Meier

Summary courtesy of Goodreads: 


Halloween is coming to Tinker’s Cove, Maine, and local reporter Lucy Stone is covering the town’s annual Giant Pumpkin Fest for the Pennysaver. There’s the pumpkin-boat regatta, the children’s Halloween party, the pumpkin weigh-in…even a contest where home-built catapults hurl pumpkins at an old Dodge! But not everything goes quite as planned…Lucy’s getting very annoyed that her husband Bill and his friend Evan have been working seemingly nonstop on their potentially prize-winning pumpkin catapult. But when the day of the big contest arrives, Evan is nowhere to be found…until a catapulted pumpkin busts open the trunk of the Dodge. Amid the pumpkin gore is a very deceased Evan, bashed in the head and placed in the trunk by someone long before the contest started.

Bill is on the hook for the Halloween homicide—he was the last one to see Evan—so Lucy knows she’s got some serious sleuthing to do. The crime’s trail seems to always circle back to Country Cousins, the town’s once-quaint general store that’s now become a big Internet player. Though the store’s founder, Old Sam Miller, is long gone, his son Tom and grandson Trey now run the hugely successful company. But whispered rumors say things aren’t going well, and Lucy finds that this case may have something to do with an unsolved, decades-old Miller family mystery…

With each new lead pointing her in a different direction, Lucy sees that time is quickly running out. If she wants to spook the real killer, she’ll have to step into an old ghost story…

My Review:


I received this copy from Netgalley and the Publisher in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. 


This is the first book that I have read in the Leslie Meier "Lucy Stone" series. So as a reader I was not sure what her riding style was like and her character development. I found myself having a hard time connecting myself with the main character. I think because of this it caused me to have a difficult time getting into the book. I think that she did a great job describing the main characters, however, I think that a little too much time was spent on characters that did not have that much importance in the story. 




In regards to the setting of the book I think she did a great job describing the layout of the town and how everything was setup. It really did sound like a small town where everyone new each other and mostly got a long.In addition, I found that she did an excellent job of describing the murder scenes in the book. She gave you enough information to give you an idea of what the image would look like but did not make it overly gruesome. I think this is something that helped me continue to read the book. 




In regards to the pace of the book I found it to be pretty slow in the beginning. However, once you got to the middle of the book I found that the pace picked up. Once the pace picked up and they got to the juice of the story I was hooked and wanted to know who'd done it.




All in all I thought this was a decent first read of Leslie Meier's Lucy Stone series. As most readers would says about all books there are good parts and bad parts in most stories. Sometimes you just have to stick it out to get to the best part. 




One last item, if you have not read the previous books in the Lucy Stone series I would 

recommend it. I think that it would have helped me understand the characters better and probably the surrounding. This would have caused less staleness of the book in the beginning.