Line Up for Murder by Marian Babson

I liked this book but there's something important you should know: it's not a murder mystery. It's only barely a mystery. I didn't mind, but some people might.

Dorrie Witson considers herself an expert queuer, so when the London department store Bonnard's holds a special sale to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Dorrie is third in line a week before the store reopens. Behind her are a mysterious young woman and her sullen boyfriend. As the days drag on and Dorrie gets to know her fellow queuers, she senses something strange is going on with the woman--and possibly with Bonnard's itself.

About a third of the way into this book, I caught myself wishing that there wouldn't be a stupid murder to mess up the cozy enjoyment of reading about these people waiting for a big sale. Lucky for me, there is no murder. Yes, one character has a gun and another character has (possibly) poison, but it's okay. No one dies. (Maybe I should have marked that as a spoiler, but someone does get shot at and someone does swallow the doctored drink, and it's not like I just told you who and what precisely happens.)

The plot is shallow and not really a mystery. It was just what I was looking for, though. I did have a problem with the racist overtones in Dorrie's (and other characters') dislike of two foreign characters. The book was first published in 1980, which is plenty recent enough for authors to be more sensitive when it comes to issues of race.

But except for that, and the weird non-mystery-ness of this mystery, it's a fun little book.

Powell's link (used book)

The Cat Next Door by Marian Babson

I really like Marian Babson's mysteries, but The Cat Next Door is not one of her good ones. There isn't much of a mystery, and the solving of it depends on coincidence and confession, not investigation.

Margot--and she doesn't seem to have a last name--is a photographer who's returned to her family home in England after several years working in New York City. She's come home because her Aunt Chloe is about to go on trial for killing her Aunt Claudia--Chloe's twin sister--and the family wants to show solidarity.

Everyone in the unnamed family is neurotic, which can be amusing in a cozy mystery but which doesn't work in this case. The characters are defined and limited by their neuroses: the teenager who refuses to leave her bed after witnessing the murder, the uncle who does nothing but eat compulsively, the aunt who's buried herself in reading Regency romances rather than face the family scandal of murder. Even Margot, the main character, suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome--which is coyly not named until the very end of the book, as if it too were a mystery--which makes her a particularly unlively sleuth. Not that any sleuthing gets done in the book. Stuff just happens, and Margot thinks for a few minutes and decides in the next-to-last chapter that Someone Else killed her aunt, not Chloe. She's wrong about who the murderer is, but fortunately the real murderer confesses.

It's a thoroughly unsatisfying book. For a murder mystery, that's unforgivable.

B&N link