Summary:

Missing jewels, a witch’s dagger and murder…
Just a regular day at Cardinal Woolsey’s Knitting and Yarn shop in Oxford.

When glamorous vampire Sylvia discovers a movie company is remaking one of her most famous silent films, she’s determined to get some creative input and decides to make knitting shop owner Lucy the beneficiary of her estate. Lucy will front for Sylvia in dealing with the movie executives who want to recreate the priceless Cartier jewels made specially for the original movie and still owned by Sylvia.

Meanwhile, Lucy’s moving along in her witch’s training. It’s time to choose her own athame, a dagger that she’ll use for spells.

With all that going on she’s barely got time to run a knitting shop, never mind solve another murder.

Goodreads

Thoughts:

I can’t believe we’re on book eleven of this wonderful cozy paranormal mystery series. I continue to love these books, to absolutely no one’s surprise. 🙂

This time Lucy is investigating a heist but then it turns into a murder investigation as well. Sylvia, one of the vampires who lives in the tunnels under Lucy’s shop, was a famous movie star during the silent film era, and some producers want to remake a movie of hers and are keen on seeing the original jewels which Sylvia still has in her possession. So she asks Lucy to pretend to be the heir to her estate and become involved in this production in order to show off the jewels. But then disaster strikes and the jewels go missing while in Lucy’s possession.

One thing that struck me with this one was Sylvia’s character. She’s always been a forceful personality and also vain, but here her vanity is off the charts. She was never really mean to Lucy before but when things go down she becomes most vicious towards Lucy, blaming her for everything and not even caring if she was also hurt. I’m not sure if this is true to Sylvia’s character, although maybe it was and we’ve just never seen anything to provoke this sort of response before. I was honestly really fed up with Sylvia in this book and I don’t think Lucy will completely let her off the hook even though things seem to have cooled down between them by the end of this one. Nonetheless, I think the tension within the group added an extra dynamic to this volume.

Speaking of characters, I’m interested to see where things go with Lucy and Rafe. There’s been a slow build up to their relationship and while he’s wanting to take things to another level, Lucy is still unsure for various reasons. Not to mention that Lucy is very aware of how controlling Rafe can be and while sometimes she appreciates him taking charge, other times it really bothers her. I do like Rafe a lot (of course, he’s a hot vampire who likes old books!) but I’m still having some misgivings about him as a long-term love interest for Lucy. And the fact that Lucy herself is so unsure also speaks volumes to me. I guess we’ll see what happens down the road. 🙂

As for the mystery in this one, while I had NO IDEA who was responsible, I did pretty quickly figure out the HOW, perhaps because I’ve seen a lot of heist films and I’m used to elaborate ruses. But it was still a fun mystery and of course I never would have guessed the motivation for this one. I also thought the other elements of the series, the staples, were represented well in this one–there seemed to be an equal amount of time devoted to the knitting club, the vampires, Lucy’s witchcraft studies and the mystery at hand. Oh! One other thing that I really appreciated about this one is that some of the other vampires really became involved in investigating the mystery and I think they made a great team as everyone played to their various strengths.

Overall, I thought this was another great entry into this series. Very much looking forward to future volumes! 4.5/5 stars.