'In the quaint seaside village of Cape Willington, Maine, Candy Holliday has a most idyllic life, tending to the Blueberry Acres farm she runs with her father and occasionally stepping in to solve a murder or two...
Halloween is fast approaching, and preparations for the Pumpkin Bash, Cape Willington's annual autumn festival, are well underway. Candy is running this year's haunted hayride, in the hopes of making some extra cash. But when she discovers a real dead body near some fake tombstones, Candy's side job becomes a full-blown investigation to find out who turned a holiday attraction into a real horror show.
Will Candy's keen eye for detail unearth buried town secrets? As her search leads her through old graveyards and a haunted house, Candy will discover that not all of the skeletons hidden in this small town's closets are Halloween decorations...'
My thoughts:
This series is probably in my top ten favorite cozy mystery series list. I loved every book released in this series and when this one came out, I knew I was going to have to read it. This one started a little slowly for me, but once the book got moving and the mystery became intense, I started to enjoy it. I will say that I liked this one less than the ones before it, but there's a twist ending that leaves the door open for more intrigue in the future installments. Now I am on edge waiting for the next one to be released, because the hint of malice and murder in the future books sounds so intriguing!
Candy Holliday is working at a local pumpkin farm this Halloween to earn some extra money, but what she wasn't planning on was stumbling across another body. Of course, she has to figure out who wanted this person dead and why, as it's just her nature to be that way. She begins to snoop around and finds some uncanny similarities to another murder that happened twenty years before in the same exact place. She begins to wonder if there is some connection to these two different murders and sets on her way to solve the case. With her friends, who we've come to love along the way, she aims to solve the murders of the past and the present before someone else ends up dead.
I really enjoyed returning back to Cape Wellington, Maine, as the town sounds so beautiful and so quaint that I would just love to live there. The author does a great job of painting the town as a picturesque cozy place that I just enjoy reading these books to return to the setting. This mystery is set in fall and the descriptions of the lovely colors of leaves almost makes me miss fall a little bit. Haywood does a fantastic job of creating an idealistic setting and the murder mystery isn't something you figure out until the very end. As I said before, the ending leaves the reader with a taste of what the future holds for Candy and Cape Willington and I can't wait to see what happens next. Not the best in this series, but a good read nonetheless.
Overall Rating: 3
Title: Town in a Pumpkin Bash
Author: B.B. Haywood
Series: Candy Holliday Mystery #4
Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: February 5, 2013
Pages: 336
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Get It: Amazon; Barnes & Noble
Disclaimer: This book was purchased by myself and I reviewed this book without compensation of any kind. All thoughts and opinions are solely mine.