Country Comes To Town: A Laura Fleming Mystery [Paperback]

Toni L. P. Kelner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Laura Fleming Mystery | Publication Date: January 1, 1998

With her husband off in England, snowbound Laura Fleming is looking forward to spending a quiet weekend alone, until a wicked winter squall sweeps the Boston police to her front door. The body of her old college boyfriend, Philip Dennis, has been found frozen in the alley behind her Back Bay apartment. To make matters worse, he'd arrived at Laura's only hours before looking for a place to stay. When she sent him back out into the gathering storm, she never dreamed he'd end up dead--or that she'd be implicated in the murder.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kelner brings a small-town atmosphere to Boston as computer programmer Laura Fleming, Kelner's Southern-born sleuth seen last in Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen (1995), hosts her country cousin Thaddeous. With her husband, Richard, out of town, Laura receives a surprise visit from college ex-boyfriend Philip Dennis, who's looking for temporary digs. After turning him away and picking up Thaddeous at the airport, Laura is horrified to learn that Philip has been found dead behind her apartment building. Having had previous sleuthing success in their hometown of Byerly, N.C., Laura and her cousin determine to find the killer. While Thaddeous nurses a budding romance with Laura's receptionist, Laura infiltrates Philip's company, which is made up of long-forgotten college friends from MIT. A second murder within the company offices confirms Laura's suspicions that one of her old friends is a killer. Greed and jealousy in the intricate world of computers provide a nonstop pace, slowed only occasionally by Thaddeous's Southern charm and Richard's annoying habit of quoting Shakespeare in every phone chat with Laura.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A fourth outing for Laura Fleming (Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen, 1995, etc.): MIT graduate and computer programmer, spouse to a compulsive Shakespeare quoter (currently and mercifully abroad), and sometime amateur sleuth. Laura is also the gift given by Byerly, North Carolina, to the Boston area, a sentimental southerner with a superficial coating of city smarts and a wealth of eccentric relatives always ringing her up. In this latest adventure, which has to do with the death of an old college boyfriend in her parking lot, Laura is joined by hick cousin Thaddeus--you'll want to call him Jethro--who does some legwork and has a wearingly irrelevant romance with a predatory secretary. The ex-boyfriend, Philip Dennis, was disliked by all members of his own computer company, so Laura goes undercover, changes jobs, and chats up a passel of old MIT buddies to find the culprit. On her way to disclosure, she dishes enough dirt on the victim (adultery, blackmail, corporate high-jinks) to make you wonder how she could have dated the creep. But then, despite some neat computer stuff and a few ingenious conversations on the morality of meddling, Laura herself and her cronies don't seem quite grown-up enough to interest seasoned crime buffs. Obvious jokes and excruciating attention paid to such matters as telephoning for pizza slow this leisurely enterprise to a plod. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 314 pages
• Publisher: Kensington; Reprint edition (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575662442
• ISBN-13: 978-1575662442
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,622,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Interesting, June 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Country Comes To Town: A Laura Fleming Mystery (Paperback)

This book wasn't as cute as the one right before (Trouble Looking For a Place To Happen)because Laura's funny husband Richard was not there in person, and only Thaddeus of the Byerly relations was present (the story taking place in Boston), but I found the mystery more gripping. Richard still features in it via phone calls and quotes more than Shakespeare, and you meet a suspicious, unbreakable group of Laura's former college friends, who have started a very elite and self-destructive company (SSI). The characters had more history and motive than previous Laura Fleming books, and an uncomfortable relationship that in ways made it more disconcerting investigating them for murder than it would be investigating friends (such as in Down Home Murder). Anyway, this book was pretty good and this series is quickly developing into a Southern delight. Oh, BTW, Thaddeus gets a Yankee girlfriend!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good addition to the series, January 1, 2002

By 

Moe811 (New York USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Country Comes To Town: A Laura Fleming Mystery (Paperback)

Richard is away on a trip to England, teaching a course on Shakespeare to Boston College students abroad. Laura is stuck home alone, finishing a big project at work. An old boyfriend shows up out of the blue and asks to stay with her. His wife had the good sense to throw him out. Laura refuses, but his body is found behind her building the next day, frozen to death. In the meantime, her cousin Thaddeous comes up for a surprise visit and is there when the police tell her of the death. Det. Salvatore isn't entirely sure that it was an accident. Laura's guilt over turning him away leads her to try and find out how he died. Did it have anything to do with the company that he helped to cofound? They were trying to kick him out, but who hated him enough to kill him?

I really enjoyed this mystery. Thaddeous was always one of my favorite of the cousin characters, and Michelle is not just a voice on the phone in this one. The mystery wasn't all that difficult to figure out, but it was alot of fun getting there.

5.0 out of 5 stars Chiaroscuro, October 29, 2000

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Country Comes To Town: A Laura Fleming Mystery (Paperback)

This is deeper and darker and better than "Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen." A theme of contrasts is evident, symbolized by country versus town and north versus south and emphasized in all sorts of subtle ways, even in the food (the ordering of pizza has an artistic purpose) An effective moment is when the newcomer is cheerfully shown the historic sights of Boston then arrives at his cousin's apartment to hear "Some bum froze to death back there. See you later. Here's my ride." The Southern belle heroine is a computer maven. The characters are often talented but flawed and ambiguous. Richard has been to see Hamlet.