Victoria Gilbert’s third Booklover’s B&B Mystery, a treat for fans of Mary Daheim and Kate Carlisle, finds owner Charlotte Reed and her former spy neighbor, Ellen Montgomery, pitted against a tea-party poisoner.

Booklover Charlotte is delighted to welcome an eclectic group of guests to Chapters Bed and Breakfast for a book club retreat focused on fairy tales and classic children’s literature. But when one of the guests is poisoned at a Mad Hatter tea party, Charlotte realizes she’s fallen down a rather unpleasant rabbit hole

The victim – an opinionated busybody whose jewelry store sold original designs, along with some possibly “hot” merchandise – had plenty of enemies, spurring Charlotte and Ellen to offer their well-honed investigative skills to assist the local police. But as they delve deeper into the each of the guest’s stories, they realize all of them had a motive, and the means, to close the book on the unfortunate victim.

Enlisting the aid of a few local residents, as well as their new ally, agent Gavin Howard, Charlotte and Ellen vow to reveal the truth, even if the path to any sort of happy ending is strewn with deadly danger.

A book club is having a week-long retreat at Charlotte’s B&B, Chapters. The host is an old teacher friend of Charlotte’s whose illustrations grace some of the children’s fairy tales they will be discussing. During the Mad Hatter Tea Party one of the guests is poisoned and all the other guests are suspects. Charlotte and her octogenarian neighbor Ellen, a former government operative, investigate. As they delve deeper it appears there may be ties to Charlotte’s late great-aunt who was also a spy.

This was a nice, quick read for a spring afternoon. I enjoy the characters, the amateur sleuthing is not over the top and the solution, while a bit obvious, is not telegraphed blatantly. The ending almost reads as a series ender with several characters announcing major life changes but I hope this is just to show that our cast of characters do not have static lives. I look forward to more in this series. ~~ Stephanie L Bannon

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