Closely Akin to Murder

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Praise for Joan Hess and
THE CLAIRE MALLOY SERIES

“Well-paced suspense spiced with wry wit.”

—Boston Sunday Herald
on
Closely Akin to Murder

“Clever…irreverent murder and mayhem.”

—Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate
on
Closely Akin to Murder

“Wickedly amusing.”

—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
on
Busy Bodies

“Witty, pithy, and beautifully plotted…my favorite Claire Malloy so far.”

—
Patricia Moyes on
Busy Bodies

“Intriguing…an amusing look at the universal human comedy.”

—Fort Smith Times Record

“If you've never spent time with Claire and her crew, I feel sorry for you. Stop reading this nonsense and hop to it. You'll see wit and humanity all wrapped up in a nifty murder mystery.”

—Harlan Coben

“Delightful…worthy of Hercule Poirot in the classic
Death on the Nile
.”

—Publishers Weekly
on
Mummy Dearest

“A good substitute for a trip to Egypt.”

—Deadly Pleasures
on
Mummy Dearest

“Hess fans will find much to entertain them.”

—Publishers Weekly
on
Damsels in Distress

MORE…

 

“Lively, sharp, irreverent.”

—The New York Times Book Review
on
Poisoned Pins

“Larcenous shenanigans…breezy throughout.”

—Chicago Tribune
on
Poisoned Pins

“With her wry asides, Claire makes a most engaging narrator. The author deftly juggles the various plot strands…the surprising denouement comes off with éclat.”

—Publishers Weekly
on
Out on a Limb

“A winning blend of soft-core feminism, trendy subplots, and a completely irreverent style that characterizes both the series and the sleuth.”

—Houston Chronicle

“A wildly entertaining series.”

—Mystery Scene

“Joan Hess is one of the best mystery writers in the world. She makes it look so easy that few readers and fewer critics realize what a rare talent hers is.”

—Elizabeth Peters, author of
Tomb of the Golden Bird

“Joan Hess is seriously funny. Moreover, she is seriously kind as well as clever when depicting the follies, foibles, and fantasies of our lives. Viva Joan!”

—Carolyn Hart, author of
Dead Days of Summer

“Fresh and funny…her trademark humor is stamped on every page.”

—Publishers Weekly
on
The Goodbye Body
—The Drood Review

 

 

 

 

Other Mysteries from

JOAN HESS

Strangled Prose

The Murder at the Murder at the Mimosa Inn

Dear Miss Demeanor

A Really Cute Corpse

A Diet to Die For

Roll Over And Play Dead

Death by the Light of the Moon

Poisoned Pins

A Holly, Jolly Murder

A Conventional Corpse

Out on a Limb

The Goodbye Body

Damsels in Distress

Mummy Dearest

Busy Bodies

 

Available from the Minotaur Books line of
St. Martin's Paperbacks

A Claire Malloy Mystery

JOAN HESS

St. Martin's Paperbacks

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

CLOSELY AKIN TO MURDER

Copyright © 1996 by Joan Hess.
Excerpt from
The Merry Wives of Maggody
copyright © 2009 by Joan Hess.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

EAN: 978-0-312-38463-0

Printed in the United States of America

Dutton edition published 1996
Onyx edition / June 1997
St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / October 2009

St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Solitude can be a wonderful
thing. It allows one to ponder the perplexities of the universe, to examine one's strengths and imperfections (no matter how infinitesimal), or even to invite a billow of whimsical ideas into one's mind. On the other hand, solitude is not a condition to be treasured when one relies on retail sales to pay the rent, and one's accountant is forever harping about quarterly tax estimates and other dreary things of that nature.

I'd dusted every rack in the Book Depot, my charmingly drafty store beside the abandoned railroad tracks. It's situated on the main drag of Farberville, the home of thirty thousand or so good-natured souls and several thousand industrious college students. After lunch, I'd arranged an artful display of cookbooks and culinary mysteries in the front window, then stood out on the sidewalk under the portico to admire my effort as pedestrians streamed by, seemingly unimpressed. By mid-afternoon, I'd worked the crossword puzzle and was reduced to trying to decipher the personal ads (“SWCF seeks BMD with IRA”) when my solitude was interrupted. With a vengeance, I might add.

“Mother,” Caron began as she stomped across the room, her face ablaze with the degree of indignation
that only a sixteen-year-old can produce, “before you say anything, I just want you to know It Wasn't My Fault.”

Her best friend and co-conspirator, Inez Thornton, soulfully shook her head. “It really wasn't, Mrs. Malloy.”

I folded the newspaper and put it aside. Caron was maintaining a belligerent posture, but I could see apprehension lurking in her eyes. For the record, she and I share red hair, green eyes, and a complexion prone to random freckles. Without this physical evidence, I might have believed—or at least suspected—that she'd been swapped in the nursery, and somewhere out there was a child who spoke only in lower case letters and had never stolen frozen frogs from the high school biology department or been taken to the animal shelter in a gorilla suit. Caron has an impressively eclectic rap sheet for her age.

Inez does, too, although as an accomplice rather than a master criminal. She's soft-spoken, when she can get in a word, and she tends to observe Caron with the solemnity of a barn owl. Then again, hawks and owls are perceived differently, but that matters very little to a mouse caught in the moonlight.

“What's not your fault?” I asked reluctantly, assuming we were not about to discuss volcanic eruptions, EuroDisney, or the federal deficit.

Caron sighed. “All I was doing was trying to see who was in Rhonda's car with her. Louis has basketball practice until five, so it couldn't have been him. If she's going steady with him like she claims, then why would she have another guy in her car?”

“It was like in a movie,” volunteered Inez “We stayed back so she wouldn't notice us in the rearview mirror. But then—”

“Then a moving van got in the way,” Caron cut in, deftly regaining center stage. She gave me a moment to ponder the enormity of this outrage, then continued. “When we got to the corner of Willow and Thurber, Rhonda's car had vanished. I explained it to the cop.”

Maternal perspicacity failed me. “Explained what?” I asked her.

“That I had to catch up with Rhonda. If the stupid moving van hadn't pulled out right in front of me, we could have found out who was in her car when they got to wherever they were going. If anyone deserved a ticket, it was the guy driving the van. I practically had to slam on the brakes not to crash into him and end up in traction at the hospital. Or paralyzed for the rest of my life.”

I swooped in on the key word, which she'd tried to cloak in the torrent of verbiage. “You got a ticket, right?”

“It wasn't my fault,” she said as she drifted behind the science fiction rack. “I may not have come to a complete stop when I turned onto Willow, but it wasn't like I barreled around the corner at fifty miles an hour and ran over some little kid on a bicycle.”

I looked at Inez, who had her lower lip firmly clamped beneath her teeth. She aspires to achieve Caron's level of disregard for the facts, but she's not yet a proficient liar. “The ticket was for running a stop sign?”

“He wasn't very nice about it, especially after Caron pointed out that he'd ruined any chance we had of finding Rhonda.”

I tried not to imagine that conversation. “How much does the ticket cost, Caron?”