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There's more than one reason the new West Tisbury police chief officially made 92-year old Victoria Trumbull her deputy. For one thing, Victoria knows just about everything about everyone in town, and a lot about the rest of the Martha's Vineyard year-round population as well. Not to mention their ancestors. Victoria may be afflicted with the usual aches and pains that descend on nonagenarians (she has a cutoff shoe to accommodate her bunion, and a stout stick to help her on her walks across the fields and in the woods). But she is as sharp and as sharpeyed as the proverbial tack. So it's not odd that when Victoria is the only one who notices something amiss among the gravestones of the West Tisbury cemetery, the chief listens. Something is indeed amiss. Responding to a request by presumed relatives in the Midwest to disinter a coffin for reburying elsewhere, things go wrong from the start. The driver of the hearse coming to collect the coffin disappears during the Island ferry trip in a rainstorm. Other deaths - some of them irrefutably murder, the others suspicious - follow. And when as a last measure the coffin is found, dug up and opened, it does not contain the expected body. Insult upon injury, the coffin itself disappears. Meanwhile, the available for rent bedroom in Victoria's house has been taken over by a woman relative of one of their neighbors and her raucous toucan, a bird as spoiled as the most bratty millionaire's heir. Victoria is graceful about her unwanted boarders; but they do interfere with the column she writes for the local newspaper and with her efforts to discover whether the strange antics of the coffin are related to the murders. Victoria is the most realistic and the most delightful nonagenarian in mystery fiction. Her years have not blunted her intelligence and her sharp wit. We're lucky that she's still around and seems to be set for a long time.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Lloyd Fisher
reviewed The cemetery yew on January 10, 2014
The cemetery yew
Life on the Vinyard ought to be quiet, but somehow things don't work out that way. West Tisbury is home to Victoria Trumbull, 92 years old, not as physically agile as she used to be, but mentally scarily sharp--and she knows nearly everyone, or at least their families and the family history. That's why Casey, the Chief of Police hired from off-island, has appointed Victoria as her deputy.
The cemetery director, also town selectman, Denny Rhodes, gets a seemingly ordinary request from a family no longer living on island to have the coffin of a family member who committed suicide ten years ago disinterred. Now that no one is left on the island, they want to move her to Wisconsin, where they are now living. Not an issue at all--until the coffin is found to be empty except for some bags of perfectly ordinary sand.
Meanwhile, Victoria's neighbor, Howland Atherton, learns that his cousin Dahlia, whom he is not fond of, is coming for an extended visit. She's retired from the Foreign Service, is suffering from cancer, and wants to be treated at the hospital in the town where she grew up. She brings with her her pet toucan, Bacchus--and Bacchus and Howland don't like each other, to say the least. Nor has Howland ever liked Dahlia. It's not long before Dahlia and Bacchus have relocated to Victoria's spare room as boarders.
But Dahlia, like the empty coffin, has her own secrets, and bodies start turning up. One's in the town dump, where a fired that had been dying down has flared up again. Another washes up on the beach. And who sent Dahlia a Brazilian tea laced with poisonous evergreen needles?
This is a wonderful little cozy, with the pace building gradually to a fine level of tension. Victoria is smart and mentally tough, and thoroughly believable. West Tisbury may have a murder rate rivaling that of Cabot Cove, Maine in the 1980s and 1990s (as all Angela Lansbury fans will recall), but like Jessica Fletcher and her neighbors, Victoria Trumbull and her neighbors are likely to make it worthwhile.
Recommended.
I borrowed this book from the library.
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