A VENUE OF VULTURES

In Stagner’s mystery novel, a pair of retired sisters find a dead body on their property and become the prime suspects in a murder investigation.

Sisters Claire Browning and Avery Halverson decide to retire from their stressful jobs as legal assistants to a quiet home in rural East Texas nestled within a gated community called Rancho Exotica. Their bucolic tranquility is shattered when the book’s titular “venue” of vultures leads them to a dead body in a densely wooded section of their property. The deceased turns out to be a neighbor, Thorne Mondae, who was clearly murdered—he was found with a hunting arrow lodged in his heart. Because Claire recently had an angry confrontation with him (she yelled at him for trespassing on her property while hunting), she becomes a person of interest in his murder investigation. She’s so fretful she’ll be arrested that she withholds from the police a video her trail camera took of the killer—a “shadowy figure” neither of the sisters can identify—since it captures Claire as well, placing her at the scene of the crime. Claire and Avery join forces with Jay Vidocq, the dreamy head of security at Rancho Exotica and a former Dallas homicide detective. As the investigation deepens, the list of suspects grows—Thorne turns out to have been an unsavory man with a dark past—and the relationship between Avery and Jay turns romantic. Much of this crime drama is deeply formulaic and melodramatic; here, Avery explains her turn as an amateur sleuth: “When Thorne Mondae was murdered in our forest and we became suspects, our world turned upside down. We need to restore that world to its rightful position. That’s why I want so much to discover who killed Mr. Mondae.” But this delightfully cozy detective story, which is as humorous as it is intelligently conceived, does have a lightsome companionability to it. Readers who enjoy the work of Agatha Christie are sure to like this novel as well—it’s fun and largely undemanding entertainment.

An engagingly witty whodunit brimming with inventive twists and turns.