The Body in the Attic: A Faith Fairchild Mystery (Faith Fairchild Mysteries) [Hardcover]

Katherine Hall Page (Author)

Book Description

Series: Faith Fairchild Mysteries | Publication Date: April 27, 2004

In her thirteen previous Faith Fairchild mysteries, Katherine Hall Page has proven to be one of the most beloved and masterful writers of the village mystery. But when caterer Faith Fairchild's husband's job takes the family out of peaceful Aleford, Massachusetts, and into greater Boston, death rears its ugly head in the big city as well.

Fall is in the air -- its crisp chill hinting at the approaching holiday season -- yet Faith Fairchild's minister husband, Tom, is not in a festive mood. His job has become routine, and his parish seems to care more about church gossip than worship or service, leaving him doubting his own effectiveness. So when the opportunity to teach for a semester at Harvard's Divinity School comes up, he leaps at the chance . . . but Faith is reluctant. After all, this New York City girl has just gotten used to life in Aleford -- and now she has to move? But soon Faith relents, and within months the family has settled happily into a large, old home in historic Cambridge, just across the river from Boston.

Faith is shocked when she runs into an old boyfriend in downtown Boston. Thirteen years before, Richard Morgan had swept Faith off her feet, then disappeared. But the intelligent, handsome man's return is a happy one for Faith as their friendship is renewed.

Back in Cambridge, though, something is amiss in the temporary Fairchilds' residence.

Faith discovers a diary hidden in the attic by a woman living there in 1946. It reveals unspeakable horror, and soon dark secrets seem to permeate every room. Richard Morgan has secrets of his own, too, and Faith is caught up in solving the mysteries . . . with a murderer lurking a little too close to home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Agatha-winner Page's 14th warmhearted entry in her Faith Fairchild series (after 2003's The Body in the Lighthouse), the upscale caterer, amateur sleuth and born-and-bred New Yorker is, to her surprise, reluctant to leave suburban Aleford, Mass., when her minister husband Tom, frustrated and worn-out by day-to-day parish duties, announces that he's going to take a position at Harvard Divinity School for a semester. Soon after the couple settles in at their beautiful temporary home on Cambridge's prestigious Brattle Street, Faith realizes that the darkness and the creepy feeling she has about the old house are due to more than overgrown bushes. A riveting diary found in the house's attic and the sudden reappearance of old boyfriend Richard Morgan, who mysteriously disappeared 13 years before, lead her into an investigation as chilling as a New England winter. If her relationship with Morgan strains credulity at times, the interactions between her and Tom remain realistic and human. As Faith explores the byways of Boston and Cambridge in search of dangerous past secrets, both cities come to vivid life. The tempting recipes at the end for such fare as Butternut Squash Soup and Harvard Squares leave no doubt that a delicious treat is in store for cozy fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Faith packs up the kids and her catering business for a semester's stint in Cambridge, where her minister husband, Tom, will teach at Harvard and serve the homeless. In the rambling old house the family inhabits in Cambridge, Faith's children find an old wardrobe that contains . . . not Narnia but a diary from 1946. Using a lost diary as a plot device has become something of a cliche in crime fiction, but here Page uses it quite expertly to explore what's going on in Faith's life. The diary belongs to a young woman who was held prisoner in the house by a rapacious husband. Did she live and escape? Faith caters luncheons, shops with friends, rejoices in her powerhouse sister's marriage, all the while puzzling out what it is she might want and who the woman of the diary might be--using one investigation to fuel the other. While the plot comes to a sudden and very wobbly end, Faith becomes an ever more interesting character, and the recipes included are yummy. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (April 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060525290
• ISBN-13: 978-0060525293
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,484,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katherine Hall Page is the author of seventeen previous Faith Fairchild mysteries, the first of which received the Agatha Award for best first mystery, and recently The Body in the Snowdrift was honored with the Agatha Award for best novel of 2006. Page also won an Agatha for her short story "The Would-Be Widower." She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading pleasure, July 15, 2004

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Eager Reader "elenaruggs" (Braintree, MA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Body in the Attic: A Faith Fairchild Mystery (Faith Fairchild Mysteries) (Hardcover)

I became an avid reader of Katherine Hall Page's wonderful mysteries after reading an article about her in The Tufts Criterion, the alumni publication of Tufts University. In my estimation, The Body in the Attic is her best work yet. The protagonist, Faith Fairchild, is maturing as a mother and as a caterer. In some ways, perhaps she is an alter-ego of the author herself. While the two concurrent plots of the mystery provide a really good read, other themes such as balancing family with career, gourmet cuisine with urban homelessness and hunger, and ministry with personal fulfillment, are also of central concern. To be sure, there are feminine frills, presented with a delightful touch of humour, i.e. comments on accessories and designer clothes, but at its heart the novel delves in a lighthanded way into some rather serious issues of modern life.

Because Faith Fairchild's husband, Tom, is a minister, there is a spiritual overtone as well. But the religious theme does not usually enter through his character, not in previous works in which he is pastoring, nor in this one where he teaches at Harvard Divinity. Rather, it is Faith the minister's daughter and pastor's wife who usually interjects the element of living with meaning and integrity. In this volume, it is intriguing that the victim's diary is also the vehicle which speaks of God's love, as well as of the moral issues and dilemmas that spring from a commitment to live with some sort of integrity during the intolerably evil imprisonment within her home.

Then, too, the pleasures of food are presented throughout the book in a number of interesting ways. While this is true in all Katherine Hall Page's mysteries, the catalog of luscious-sounding restaurants that actually exist in Cambridge and Boston are worth researching on-line and exploring in person. Readers who live in the greater Boston area are doubly blessed.

Finally, it is worth obtaining a copy of this book for the narrative pages which follow as a sort-of postscript. Of special note in all Katherine Hall Page's works are the recipes, but as more a reader than a cook I really enjoyed this particular volume's notes on both comfort food and comfort reading. The author provides a lengthy list of authors one could curl up with for a long time to come.

In addition to our author's reading suggestions, I also look forward to curling up with a long list of future novels by this author. I wonder if she is as delightful a person as Faith Fairchild and her fictional friends. May Katherine Hall Page continue to bless us with years of new reading pleasure!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Faith and Tom move to Cambridge, May 17, 2004

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Karen Potts (Lake Jackson, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Body in the Attic: A Faith Fairchild Mystery (Faith Fairchild Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Faith Fairchild's husband Tom is becoming discontented with his life as pastor of a church in Aleford, a small town in Massachusetts. Because of this, he feels that he can't turn down the offer of a chance to fill in for a divinity professor at Harvard for a semester. Surprisingly, big-city girl Faith feels sad to pull up her roots from Aleford, if only for a little while. When she reaches their house in Cambridge, she feels a sense of foreboding, as if something mysterious has happened there at one time. Her feelings prove to be true when she finds a diary written by a woman who was literally held as a prisoner by her husband in the house in the 1940's. Meanwhile Faith encounters an old boyfriend named Richard at a homeless shelter and he tells her that he is doing undercover research for a new book he is writing. She begins to meet with Richard and does not tell her husband Tom about the meetings. This particular plot twist did not sit well with this reader, particularly since Faith is very vocal about her jealousy over one of Tom's female graduate students who becomes friendlier to him than Faith would like. Eventually the questions brought up by the diary and by Richard's presence are answered, and this latest "Body" book ends with some of Faith's favorite recipes. This is another good entry in the series about the caterer and the pastor.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WELL WRITTEN AND ENJOYABLE, September 9, 2004

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D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Body in the Attic: A Faith Fairchild Mystery (Faith Fairchild Mysteries) (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this one. Very nice character development, as in the past, and good story line. A nice mellow read. A series is difficult to sustain, but the author has done well by this one. I certainly recommend it. I do hope there are more coming.