A Dark and Stormy Knit: A Black Sheep Knitting Mystery, by Anne Canadeo
Published by Gallery Books on January 14, 2014
I should have known when I picked this up that I was going to love it. It's by the author of The Silence of the Llamas (I'm in love with that title) AND it involves both knitting and knit graffiti. I just started knitting last year and I'm finally at the point where I really enjoy it, plus I've been fascinated by knit graffiti because one of their most famous "leaders" has the same name as my daughter (Magda).
But apart from the premise, I really enjoyed the book itself. It's well-written, the characters make logical choices, and the buildup is well established. The murder doesn't happen on the first page, but rather after a series of establishing scenes that both give background and increase the tension. (Ha! Tension? See what I did there? It's a knitting pun! Oh never mind...) The first scene introduces the work of the Knit Kats, a group of knit graffiti artists who have covered the new parking meters in knitted cat hoods. Our heroine, Maggie, owns a knitting supply shop and hosts the Black Sheep Knitters group, so she is asked to comment on the guerilla knitting by the local news. But she's soon caught up in more than news interviews when a murder is discovered and one of her own Black Sheep Knitters is a suspect.
I particularly loved the author's attention to detail. I could picture just what the characters were wearing, what they ate, what the streets look like, etc. It was a cozy and satisfying mystery and I think I liked it even better than The Silence of the Llamas (which was pretty good, but this one was great). Plus, the set up was gradual enough that I was just as invested in finding out "whodunnit" as the amateur sleuth heroine was--which is not always the case with cozy mysteries, I assure you--but still tense enough that I was hanging on to every word.
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