Customer Reviews

Service for Two (A Pennyfoot Hotel Mystery)

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What a shame that this book is no longer readily available. It's definitely one of my favorites in the whole Pennyfoot Hotel series, and I'm a diehard fan.

The mystery itself is one of the best plots in the series. Someone has been using the Pennyfoot Hotel to traffic stolen jewels, and now the body of a notorious criminal from London winds up in a coffin--but at the wrong funeral. In fact, he's nearly buried at the funeral of one Dr. McDuff, who is a friend of the protagonist, Cecily Sinclair. Cecily is the widowed owner of the Pennyfoot and now has a double interest in searching out the killer--before the malicious Inspector Cranshaw finds out about the jewel thefts and has an excuse to close down her hotel!

Kingsbury has not yet fully developed several of her characters (this is the third book in the series) but she's getting there. The subplots involving the hotel servants are sweetly captivating: will Gertie and Ian get married? And what about Ethel, who's just fallen in love for the first time--with the local hero?

I love all the characters in the series, especially Cecily, and her faithful, stuffy manager Baxter. This is the book in which Baxter starts to look at Cecily in a Certain Way (and we may assume he's not thinking about her as his employer in those moments)--but trouble arrives in the form of Dr. Kevin Prestwick, the handsome replacement for Dr. McDuff, who also sees Cecily with more than a little interest. It's the beginning of a very entertaining rivalry.

So if you're a fan of cozy mysteries, this one is worth your special order. Highly recommended! (As if you couldn't tell.)

This third in the Pennyfoot Hotel series is a comfortable little cozy. I find that I enjoy the characters in this book (especially the serving staff), and the mysteries are usually a little tricky puzzle like this one. Cecily is faced with having her hotel connected to a ring of jewel thieves and to a murder, so she must set out to solve the murder on her own with the help of the faithful Baxter. It all starts with the wrong body in a casket at a funeral. These books are set in Badger's End during the English Edwardian era, so that also makes them interesting. These little stories are a lot of fun.

Things just get worse as Kingsbury struggles to give her charming little hotel and community a voice. Wait, charming hotel, well we aren't learning much more about the hotel, well not much more that is believable. Part of the plot revolves around a secret passageway that the previous owner had built that traipses through the Library down to the cellars and out to the beach. The man was an Earl (A pretty exalted titled noble) and he had to worry about privacy at this big mansion of his?

Some of Kingsbury's choices don't work. Why do the lower classes have a cockney's film dialect rather than what we have heard so often in other portrayals of the time? Let us look back to the beginning. The local Doctor has died. A minor character who has helped out on the previous two mysteries. But the constable shows up during his funeral service, it is not the Doctors body in the casket.

That in itself would be a fine plot device, but it becomes weak later on as the motive to exchange the body seems weak. Further that motive is compounded with a reason for the hotel to be at risk, which makes our heroine want to sleuth. That is an excuse, she has successfully sleuthed twice before.

We also suffer from a lack of red herrings, and while this book does not suffer from long bouts of exposition, there is too much dialogue that has no bearing on the mystery, but a great deal on a side story of a wedding taking place. it shows a lack of focus, and a lack of craftsmanship.

In all the book suffers from bad plotting, and a poor immersion of Edwardian england. I have no feel for the time from what we have here. A series I am becoming disenchanted with and beginning to wish I had not purchased.