New Book Review: A Tight Knit Murder

Title: A Tight Knit Murder

Author: Bessie Hubbard

Date: 2024

Quote: "When Julia woke up that morning, she had no idea that later in the day, she would be sitting next to a dead body and a talking cat."

My goal here was to encourage writers, so can I find an encouraging word to say for this e-book? Yes: it's short. 

There are lots of things about a piece of knitting that could suggest that it's not all that it should be. If it's supposed to be old, it might have been knitted with a "double knitting" technique that could be made only on twentieth century knitting machines, or in a color that was available only after the mid-nineteenth century when aniline dyes entered the market, or of a material that...etc., etc., etc.

In this novel, Julia recognizes that an allegedly antique blanket is newer than it's supposed to be because it was made with finer hooks that were allegedly new. Hooks? Number one: nothing is handknitted with hooks. Hooks are used in crocheting and machine knitting. And, number two: fineness of weaving and knitting was prized in the Middle Ages. Antique knitting was worked at forty stitches to the inch or more, sometimes with single strands of silk. People knitted with single threads on wires finer than modern sewing needles, because they could. If anything, recent knitting might be coarser than an authentic antique--fragments of quite chunky knitting have been dated back to the sixteenth century, but they weren't prized and preserved so they survived only as fragments. Of course, a difference in gauge or in yarn handling technique could show an untold chapter in a piece's history without providing a precise date-stamp...but in this novel, the date-stamp chosen as a main part of the plot is not believable.

There's no suspense about the rest of the mystery, either, and the fantasy of the cat's talking adds nothing to the story. If we're going to fantasize about animals speaking perfect English, they should have something out of the ordinary to say. Or the author could have observed how real cats "talk"--with gestures, postures, body language generally, with cat noises the humans have learned to recognize, or even, as Elizabeth Barrette claims, with cat noises the cats have learned to use like standard English words: real cats can say "no," "now," "yah," "me," and similar words and, if their humans pay attention and reward their use of these words, they can learn to speak limited yet flawless English. The cat in this novel uses words real cats can't pronounce but he has nothing to say. He'd be better explained as "saying" the thoughts that are going through Julia's head while she brushes his coat or watches him eat, but no such luck.

There's nothing individual about the writer's voice, either. They're not really obtrusive--a human did at least edit this book--but there are some of the little redundancies and cliches that we find in documents "written" by robots.

It's a cozy mystery. Nobody's in danger; the mystery is about how and why a knitted piece was faked, and the one victim's death wasn't very violent. A Tight Knit Murder does fulfill its promise of a cozy mystery but fans of the better Book Funnel authors, like Fern Cooper (who I suspect hadn't read this book when Book  Funnel used her to "recommend" it) and Pamela Burford, probably won't like it.