Cynthia Riggs |
Cynthia Riggs has been a geologist, operator of the Chesapeake Bay Ferry, and a rigger on Martha's Vinyard.
This series is based on Martha's Vinyard, and stars the nonagenarian, Victoria Trumbull. The atmosphere and characters of the New England setting are wonderfully done. If you have any experience with people from and life in this area you'll have plenty to chuckle at. I love the details of the island setting and the unusual place names. This is regional fiction at its best.
Victoria is always 92, and the books can be read in any order. However,
Jack in the Pulpit sets the stage for events mentioned in the other books.
One small warning- language is not toned down.
Recurring Characters:
Victoria Trumbell, age 92
Elizabeth, her adult granddaughter
Hope, her adult great-grand niece
Howland Atherton
#1- Deadly Nightshade (2001)
Victoria is waiting on the dock for Elizabeth to finish her shift as assistant Harbormaster. It is dusk. Victoria hears a blood-curdling scream cove across the water. Elizabeth returns, but she has not heard it. The Harbormaster, Domingo, believes Victoria and the go out in a small boat to track down the noise. They find a discmboweled body, and it is a local man.
Domingo is a retired cop who has been hired from out of town for the summer. A great many local authorities are not happy about that because he knows for certain that there is a lot of skimming being done due to the lax menthod of collecting and recording harbor fees. Domingo brings in someone to set up a computer program to track the money and makes quite a few enemies.
Many of the summer hires are local highschoolers, mostly children or grandchildren of the people who think they can do anything they want. Coupled with having no work ethic, they are making Domingo and Elizabeth's jobs miserable.
#2- The Cranefly Orchid Murders (2002)
This is one of my personal favorites of the series.
An elderly lady is still living in her family home on a large area of land known as Sachem's Rock. She is estranged from her family and refuses to leave it to any children or grandchildren. The Conservationists want the property. A developer wants the property. The tribe wants it to build a casino, a commune wants to take control, and the town of West Tisbury wants to turn it into a campground and park.
The developer talks the woman into selling to him, to everyone's dismay. Victoria is recruited by the conservationists to try to find some endangered plants on the property so they can have development stopped. Victoria teams up with Robin, an eleven-year-old nerdy boy, to hunt for plants by following the "ancient ways," pathways through the property that are supposed to remain public rights-of-way.
Victoria and Robin do find Cranefly Orchids. They also find fences and a man living underground. Then the orchids disappear and different ones are planted in their place.
What is going on?
#3- The Cemetery Yew (2003)
The town receives a request to disinter a casket from a ten-year-old suicide. It will be picked up by hearse because the body is going to be transferred to Milwaukee for reburial in a family plot. However, the grave is empty. The curmudgeonly cemetery supervisor blames the backhoe operator, and the blame goes round and round.
Howland Atherton's cousin Dahlia is retiring from the Foreign Service and shows up, claiming she owns half his house. She is in poor health, taking cancer treatments. She also comes with a raucous toucan that drives everyone nuts. When she and Howland can't get along,
Victoria takes in Dahlia and the bird, but Elizabeth can't stand them.
Meanwhile, when the hearse arrives on the ferry, the driver has disappeared and the vehicle is locked. Then several other off-islanders appear and are somewhat quickly killed! They all seem to have ties to Dahlia, and someone is also trying to kill her.
#4- Jack in the Pulpit (2004)
Given some of the events, this book seems to be first in the series although it was not written first.
This is a book with complex layers. The previous pastor of Tisbury Church was named Jack. The new pastor is also named Jack and there is some conflict between them. Meanwhile, four people die in one month, but not of apparently related causes.
Elizabeth has divorced her husband, Lockwood, and is living with Victoria. In a rare case of poor analysis of another person, Victoria gives him the benefit of the doubt, but he's pretty much a psychopath who comes to the island to stalk Elizabeth.
It begins to look like the four deaths in one month are pretty unusual, and Victoria traces them to recipes made with deadly wild Amanita mushrooms. But who is trying to kill whom?
There is a classic who-dun-it denoument when Victoria reveals all at a meeting of the Kippers Women's Club where she was scheduled to speak on the history of police work in West Tisbury..
#5- The Paperwhite Narcissus (2005)
The publisher of the local paper, Colly Jameson, is receiving threatening letters, and all of them seem to be in response to unexplained accidents or deaths in the area. The truth is that nobody likes Colly anyway. He's a narcissistic bully with 4 ex-wives and one unhappy current wife. He is firing staff members, claiming he doesn't need them in the summer when the truth is that he just wasn't to use college-age interns for free.
However, an attempted murder, a successful murder, and an unexplained death all seem linked to Colly.
When he fires Victoria Trumbull, she goes to work for Tom Botts who is printing a weekly, one-page, alternative news sheet. She also gets Colly to pay her to find out who is sending the threatening letters.
#6- Indian Pipes (2006)
The local Native American sovereign nation is negotiating to build a casino on the island. However, there is a lot of disagreement as to the form it should take. A local contractor, Jubal Burkhart, who has to sign off on various permits is taking bribes from the factions.
Meanwhile, a motorcycle rally comes to the island. The noisy grouup is not popular with a number of the locals.
Hiram Pennybacker, an older man who doesn't know when to stop talking seems rather harmless, but he disappears. When Jubal's house burns to the ground, a body is found inside among the stacks of hoarded papers and magazines. Jubal's property turns out to be worth $18 million, but who inherits.
#7- Shooting Star (2007)
Victoria has written a new screenplay of Dracula that she hopes will be taken quite seriously by those who choose to attend the local theater production.
Instead the youngest actor goes missing, and others are being injured or killed. Substitutions in the cast result in the play becoming a hit farce, much to Victoria's dismay.
There is so much animosity between cast members and the director it's easy to draw certain conclsions about the deaths. Meanwhile, where is Teddy, the young cast member?
#8- Death and Honesty (2009)
The town assessors are jacking up tax bills and skimming the extra off the top. But someone is trying to horn in on their operation.
Meanwhile, a rather trashy and naive woman who moved to the Island and bought an old historic home had that house torn down, and she built a modern mansion. She is married to a TV evangelist. Despite her flaws, Victoria likes Delilah. Delilah is not naive enough to stand for the outrageous tax bill she receives, and she stirs up a hornet's nest.
Meanwhile, what is the good reverend up to?
#9- Touch-Me-Not (2010)
#10 The Bee Balm Murders (2011)
Orion Nanopoulos arrives on the island for an extended stay to lay fiber optic cable. He rents a room at Victoria's house. Not long after they start digging to lay the cable, a man is found dead in the trench. An all-night rain has washed away any clues as to how he got there.
It turns out that the dead man has connections to the mob, but meanwhile there is a lot of local hanky-panky going on with the contracts for the fiber optic cable.
#11 Poison Ivy (2014)
#12 Bloodroot (2016)
An older woman, Mrs. Wilmington, who raised her for grandchildren dies unexpectedly in the dentist's chair. She was not liked by anyone, including her grandchildren. When an autopsy shows she died of arsenic poisoning, there are too many suspects.
On the same day that Mrs. Wilmington dies, the dental receptionist accidentally drowns on her way home from the office.
The grandchildren are all adults now, and they all have motives to get rid of grandma, chief among them is to get her money. But a tangled web of relationships relating to the staff of the dental clinic also emerges. Maybe the receptionist's death was not an accident.
Elizabeth's psychopathic ex-husband is stalking her again.
#13 Trumpet of Death (2017)
#14 Widow's Wreath (2018)
Penny, a young cousin of Victoria's has requested that her wedding reception be held on Victoria's property on the Island. Victoria agrees, but she soon loarns that the whole affair is huge and much more complex than she would like to host.
When a body is found hanging in Victoria's seldom-visited cellar, everything is postponed. In fact, we soon learn that Penny was marrying Rocco for his money, and he was marrying her for her money. But when they each learn that neither one has money, the wedding is called off.
Rocco's family has serious ties to the mob, and several of his relatives are on the island for the wedding.
John Sandford (Random House) 