Title: Twisted Wedding
Author: Hazel Smith
Date: 2022
Publisher: Hazel Smith
Quote; "Being a regular maid will be just fine."
Ivy Stone wants to be a maid at a luxury hotel in London; meanwhile she's practicing at a small private hotel in Scotland owned and operated by old friends.
Is there such a thing as a vocation to be a hotel maid? Isn't that a job people take out of desperation? Not in Ivy's case. Ivy's not ready to admit it yet, but her real vocation is to be a detective working undercover as a hotel maid.
In Twisted Wedding, a short introduction to a series of longer stories, Ivy soon observes that the couple staging the lavish wedding at the hotel aren't very nice people, nor are they "in love." The bridegroom dreads the wedding and intends to stay disgustingly drunk throughout the celebration. The bride may want to think she's in love, but she's blackmailing the poor drunken idjit into marrying her. The bridesmaids don't like the bride much either.
And so Ivy just happens to be in a position to see for sure that, when the bride-to-be whines that she'll die if the bridegroom doesn't go through with the wedding, and he mutters drunkenly "Why don't you?", he's standing at a good healthy distance. Maybe the bride really did jump off the balcony and die. But the bridegroom's pretty sure that, in the gathering dusk, he felt a nudge. Could he possibly have pushed her? He's too drunk to be sure...
Ivy's friends in Scotland include a man who's old enough to propose to Ivy, but not mature or responsible enough to be accepted, and his Great lovable drooling Dane. Ivy will, of course, get the job in London. One of these two true-blue friends, or pets, will accompany her. In an e-mail Hazel Smith confided to a few hundred readers that, although the humans in this story are fiction, the giant dog is based on a real dog her family bought to guard her when she was home alone writing all day; she thought of herself as a cat person and didn't think she'd ever really love the dog, but she did.
Unlike yesterday's cozy mystery, this one does look like a Real Novel in miniature, with professional-quality editing and no awkward lurches back into a different version of the story. If you like a cozy mystery that slowly unfolds a believable plot, you'll want to order a printed copy of Mystery Maid, the first full-length novel in the Maid Ivy Series.
As a bonus there are recipes for decadent party foods that appear in the story, at the end of Twisted Wedding. You may want to make them, and that will mean organizing a large party since they're far too rich for family use. The shortbread-based torte, especially, needs to be cut into one-bite pieces and offered on a table where it's surrounded by fruit platters and punch cups.
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