Reviews for Hornswoggled: An Alafair Tucker Mystery

The average rating for Hornswoggled: An Alafair Tucker Mystery based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-30 00:00:00 Bonita Rothschild I'm not a cozy kind of guy, but I recently found Donis Casey's series featuring Alafair Tucker, farm wife, mother and amateur sleuth in early Twentieth Century Oklahoma,and I am experiencing the zeal of the new convert. While I still prefer my crime fiction darker, I relish each visit to the Tucker farm. HORNSWOGGLED picks up the next year after the events of the previous book, and begins with the discovery of a body in the creek running through the Tucker property. The victim, with a bone-handled knife still planted deep in her chest, is the wife of the local barber, a prosperous, well-liked man who still manages to acquire a bit of a reputation as a philanderer. When Alafair's daughter, Alice, shows signs of being smitten by the new widower,Alafair's instinctual distrust of the would-be suitor pushes her into the murder investigation. A twisted plot serves up suspects and suspense a-plenty, and the flashes of the Tuckers at home shows the strength of family and character that underlies their lives. This may be one of the major attractions of this series for me - Arkansas in the early 1960s wasn't Oklahoma in 1913; but many memories of weeks spent at my grandparents' farm are reenacted at the Tucker farm. These books are good.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-27 00:00:00 Steven Maloy HORNSWOGGLED by Donis Casey (Mystery Fiction, cozy) 2.5 star rating I so enjoyed the first in this series, The Old Buzzard Had it Coming, when I read it in 2010. There was a clever mystery, and Alifair Tucker seemed a down-to-earth and intelligent protagonist. It's awful how long it takes me to get back to a series that I want to continue. But in this case, I should have postponed it indefinitely. The mystery wasn't at all fairly clued and the body was moved surreptitiously so many times by so many different people that the book reminded me of the period English farces I watched at the Shaw Festival decades ago. Only the book wasn't funny. Points for the period setting (1912 Oklahoma) and dealing with thorny family issues. Read this if: you're determined to read everything in this series; or you'd enjoy the Oklahoma setting enough to overcome the plot flaws. 2½ stars