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Title details for Strawberries and Crime by Elle Brooke White - Available

Strawberries and Crime

#2 in series

by Elle Brooke White
ebook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
In Elle B. White's delightful second Finn Family Farm mystery, farmer Charlotte Finn and her sleuthing baby pig are neck-deep in strawberries and crime.
Things are finally growing smoothly on the Finn Family Farm. With the help of caretakers Joe and Alice Wong and farmer Samuel Brown, Charlotte Finn is starting to feel at home at the Santa Barbara County produce farm she inherited. But all is not strawberries and cream: A blight is destroying young berry plants. Worse, another mysterious death is shaking Little Acorn.
The victim is grizzled, cantankerous Linc Pierce, the only farmer in Little Acorn whose strawberry crop was fruitful. Charlotte and her old friend Beau Mason find him hanging from the rafter, an apparent suicide. But a cursory search turns up a half-eaten sandwich. Who eats before he kills himself?
Chief Goodacre suspects foul play. Her prime suspect is Beau, who exchanged words—and worse—with Linc earlier in the day. Meanwhile, Little Acorn's farmers point accusing fingers at one another, recalling Linc's suggestion that someone sabotaged their strawberries. As Charlotte searches for clues to exonerate Beau, she finds something on Linc's workbench not buried in dust. Could this be why Linc's strawberry plants are alive? And, perhaps, why Linc is dead?
Now, if Charlotte and Horse—the farm's baby pig with a bottomless stomach and an insatiable hunger for sleuthing—can't root out the murderer, they, too, may end up dead and berried.

  • Creators

  • Series

    A Finn Family Farm Mystery

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 12, 2021

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781643855790

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781643855790
      • File size: 1165 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      August 15, 2021
      Murder rocks a California farm community. Under Charlotte Finn's loving direction, Finn Family Farm has become a sort of Peaceable Kingdom. Tomatoes and strawberries thrive in the sun, their predators kept at bay naturally (ladybugs attack aphids while geese gobble slugs). Charlotte's best friend, Diane Mason, prepares to open her dream restaurant on the farm, aided by her brother, Beau, and her boyfriend, builder Danny Costa. Charlotte's pet pig, Horse, gambols gaily about with his ladybug friend, Mrs. Robinson, tucked behind his ear. Too bad the neighboring town of Little Acorn doesn't share in the Family Farm's sunshine. Hot-tempered Boyd Hoover and his equally volatile daughter, Katharine, squabble over their land. Ford Barclay aims to corner the market in strawberries using drone-powered fertilizers and insecticides, while a mysterious disease targeting strawberry plants threatens everyone's yields. But when Linc Pierce, the owner of decrepit Pierce Farm, is found dead, Charlotte leaves her idyllic world to solve her neighbor's murder. Much of White's prose is hard to decipher; sentences ramble along without punctuation, and the mysterious plant disease is referred to repeatedly as a "strawberry plight." But no amount of copy editing could redeem the clunky plotting, which careens abruptly from exposition to fantasy to dreams and features a big reveal at a moment that defies all logic. Even an adorable pig can't sell this one.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Funding for additional materials was made possible by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.