A Plus One for Murder, published in 2021, is book one in the Friend for Hire Mystery series. Currently, there are two books in the series.
In A Plus One for Murder, Emma Westlake’s travel agency business in Sweet Falls, Tennessee is drying up. So her elderly friend Dottie suggests she start a friend for hire business. After Dottie sets her up with her first two clients, Emma decides to go all in. Not long after posting an advertisement on the town’s digital bulletin board, she gets her third client.
Brian Hill, a local freelance writer and conspiracy theorist, hires Emma to accompany him to an open mic night where he plans to read a poem. He wants her to clap for him since his poem is going to make four people in the audience very uncomfortable. However, Brian has barely begun reciting the poem when he drops dead on stage.
Emma is so stunned that she sneaks away from the crime scene without talking to the authorities. When the police confirm Brian was murdered, Emma wants nothing to do with the investigation. Dottie and Emma’s new client Stephanie, however, do. Dottie is a huge fan of cozy mystery novels, and Stephanie loves to play armchair detective while watching crime shows. Eventually, the two amateur sleuths are able to convince Emma to join them in their amateur-sleuthing.
I enjoyed the mystery in A Plus One for Murder. I also enjoyed how goofy some of the characters were. However, I didn’t really like Dottie. She was a little bit too mean to Emma, criticizing her appearance and using insults to convince her to help with the investigation. Dottie even got really upset when it seemed as though the police had solved Brian’s murder before she could, whining that “[i]t’s against the cozy mystery rule.”
The gem of the book, though, was Emma’s golden retriever Scout. He’s gentle and obedient and makes sure to discreetly spit out any treats he doesn’t like so as not to offend the giver. He also loves to play fetch and ends up finding the evidence needed to identify Brian’s real killer.
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