September Fair

July 1, 2009
Dairy cows and a dead beauty queen on exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair.

The 54th Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, is having her likeness sculpted in butter when the lights go out and the tourists panic. Two minutes later, the lights come back on, but Milkfed Mary doesn't. She's been fatally poisoned with cyanide. Already on hand to cover the fair for the Battle Lake Weekly, Mira James (August Moon, 2008, etc.) snoops around the fairgrounds to find out who wanted the teen dead. Her busybody antics are both abetted and thwarted by rambunctious 84-year-old Mrs. Berns and Battle Lake mayor Kennie Rogers. In between sampling fried nut-goodies-on-a-stick, swooning over Neil Diamond in the fair amphitheater and e-mailing her latest fella, Johnny Leeson, Mira cultivates several suspects: the president of the State Fair Association, the official Milkfed Mary chaperone, the marketing director of Bovine Productivity Management and a vegan protester of animal cruelty. Embezzlement, growth-hormone experimentation and the competitiveness endemic to all the great American beauty pageants will come into play before the fairgrounds are safe once again for suicidally diet-busting behavior.

So-so plotting, but it's hard to resist the saucy octogenarian and all that fried butter.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 1, 2009
Wherever Mira James, librarian and reporter for the Battle Lake Recall, goes, theres sure to be a murder, and the Minnesota State Fair is no exception. While waiting for her lovely face to be immortalized in a butter sculpture, Ashley Kirsten Pederson, the 54th Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, is killed. Of course, the murderer accomplishes this in a split second in front of a crowd. The list of suspects is long and diverse, including an ecoterrorist protesting the treatment of cows; fellow teen beauty contestants; the substitute butter sculptor; a slimy milk-industry representative, and a bitter contestant chaperone. As Mira digs into the mystery, the killer decides shes getting too close to solving the murder, and designates her as the next victim. Once again, the very funny Lourey serves up a delicious dish of murder, mayhem, and merriment. Librarians will want to take note that this installment in the Murder-by-Month series is the perfect companion to Connie Brockways Hot Dish (2006), another hilarious story of the dangers of butter sculptures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

July 13, 2009
Lourey's lively fifth murder-by-month mystery (after 2008's August Moon
) finds Mira James, assistant librarian and part-time reporter for the Battle Lake Recall
, covering the beauty pageant to elect Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, at the Minnesota State Fair. Unfortunately, “drop dead gorgeous” Ashley Pederson, a native of Battle Lake, Minn., turns up poisoned to death in the refrigerated room where, as winner of the contest, she was having her head sculpted in butter. Mira, in her effort to solve Ashley's murder, uncovers smalltown jealousies, secret love affairs, embezzlement and a big dairy concern engaged in dubious practices. The author does a good job of presenting the fairground activities, even if some of them, like sheep riding (billed as “mutton busting”), border on the absurd. Cozy fans who aren't sticklers for credibility will be entertained.