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   Book Info

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The Body in the Basement  
Author: Katherine Hall Page
ISBN: 0380723395
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review

From Publishers Weekly
Featuring recipes, quilting lore and murder, Page's sixth entry in the Faith Fairchild series (after The Body in the Cast) centers around the Massachusetts housewife and caterer's next-door neighbor, occasional employee and friend, Pix Miller. Early in the summer on Sanpere Island, Maine, Pix and her daughter check the construction work on the Fairchilds' summer cottage and discover a quilt-wrapped body buried where the foundation will soon be poured. Dead is Mitchell Pierce, an antiques seller and house restorer with a host of enemies on the island. While her daughter begins work at the island summer camp, Pix wonders about the blue X stitched on the edge of the quilt in which the body was wrapped. As a series of pranks at the summer camp turns nasty (decapitated mice are left on a kitchen counter and red paint is splattered on boat sails), Pix begins asking questions and, although she often calls Faith with progress reports, ends up solving that murder and one that follows. This leisurely tale, with recipes for fish chowder, corn bread and blueberry tart, nicely frames the down-to-earth, eminently likable Pix, who proves an enjoyable stand-in for Faith. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A nasty surprise awaits Faith Fairchild's old friend Pix Miller when she goes to check on the construction of Faith's new summer house on Maine's Sanpere Island: There's a body carefully wrapped in a quilt hidden in the basement. Even though the contractor would soon have covered the corpse of itinerant restorer Mitchell Pierce in cement with no one being the wiser, still, as Pix's elderly mother sagely remarks, ``It's not the way one likes to start a new house.'' (Faith's own reaction: ``It'll be weeks before they let us continue.'') And the trouble on Sanpere has just begun: Pix's daughter Samantha finds three decapitated mice at her summer camp, a display of plastic bats with painted blood, and a gull with its throat slit. Sounds like decorator Valerie Atherton's incorrigible teen Duncan Cowley. But would Duncan really kill Mitch Pierce--or local celebrity quilter Adelaide Bainbridge, who's found wrapped in another quilt? Or are the crimes connected instead, as Pix suspects, to a ring of antiques forgers that may just include the off-island stranger who'd been so attentive to Addie? Though Pix does duty for barely-there Faith (The Body in the Cast, 1993, etc.), the mixture is otherwise familiar. Unremittingly nice suspects and down-east recipes establish a family-values backdrop for a killer who faces the need to kill Pix by fretting: ``Our parents used to play bridge together.'' -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
A Good Foundation ... For MurderPix Miller, Faith Fairchild's next-door neighbor, expects to find more than a hole in the ground when she goes to check on the progress of the summer cottage the Fairchilds are having built on Maine's Sanpere Island. She expects a concrete foundation. What she doesn't expect is a very dead body wrapped in a very valuable antique quilt! The deceased is a local handyman with a suspiciously lucrative sideline in antiques. Sharing her friend Faith's inquisitive nature, Pix resolves to restore Sanpere's shattered peace. But by digging too deeply the determined Ms. Miller just might be arranging another burial -- her own!

About the Author
Katherine Hall Page is the author of eleven mystery novels featuring Faith Fairchild, the first of which, The Body in the Belfry, was awarded the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery.




The Body in the Basement

ANNOTATION

Saddled down by her successful catering business, Faith Fairchild asks her friend Pix Mitchell to check on the progress of the new summer cottage the Fairchild's are having built. Pix goes to the building site and finds the project behind schedule--and a corpse shrouded in a quilt and partially buried in the basement foundation. Against advice, Pix investigates. Martin's Press.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

If the contractor had been on schedule (but what contractor is?) the body in the basement of Faith Fairchild and her husband Tom's new summer cottage on Maine's Sanpere Island would never have been discovered. The concrete would have been poured and Pix Miller, Faith's friend and Aleford neighbor, would not have noticed the corner of a red and white quilt in the dirt. Nor dug out enough to see a hand protruding from it. Pix is checking on the unfinished house while the Fairchilds are stuck in Aleford, staying in touch with Faith over the phone. And trouble keeps happening, some of it involving the antique and false-antique quilts that preoccupy summer people like Pix's grande dame mother Ursula and her quilting-circle friends on the island, some centered alarmingly on the sailing camp where Pix's daughter has a summer job. Then there is a second murder, and Pix, a born helper, finds herself forced to play surrogate for Faith as amateur detective while taking care of her household and serving up traditional New England delicacies (recipes included) to her family and friends. And like Faith in previous adventures, Pix's "snooping" lands her and daughter Samantha in serious peril.

     



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