Murder Made Her Wicked

[cornerofmadness]

Murder Made Her Wicked by Elizabeth Hobbs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was so close to being a 5 star and it was mostly minor quibbles that stopped me. I did not read the first book but there are enough recaps in this that I didn't feel lost (and I don't think I'll be going back to read it because in one of the recaps she mentioned the local detective was anti-her and that is my big dislike in amateur sleuth stories. Luckily this one had no such issues)

Marigold is probably very much like what I would have been if I were still me in the 1890s (okay I'm more Ethyl but you get the point). She has earned money, fictionalizing her first mystery for publication and she now has enough money to return to Wellsley College which she desperately wants to do to continue her students in archaeology. She is coming into the semester late and has a huge amount of work to make up. Her main support is Isabella Dana, widow and part of the House of Dana fashion, Cab, lawyer and would be spouse of Marigold and now-President of Wellsley, Professor Irvine. Her distant cousin, Sarah, is there to make her life hell, especially so now that she's award that Marigold is actually illegitimate (a very big deal back then)

Marigold makes some new friends in Aggie of the lovely hat and Ethyl, the chemist but her happy return is quickly marred by thinking she saw Aggie and her hat floating in the lake. Instead, Marigold fishes out an unknown dead girl who was quickly identified as not a student. Worse, Eliza, a photojournalist wanna be shared a sneaky picture via her detective camera (I had to look to see if they existed because that surprised me. indeed they did) of Dr. Baker and Marigold tending to the dead girl with the papers. This leads to a yellow journalist Wilkerson to go out of his way to get a story from Marigold and a little bit more if he could being handsome, charming and flirtatious.

Marigold is not about to let this girl go to an unmarked anonymous grave. She first works to identify the girl and once that is done, she wants to discover her killer and find where they went off to. And it's that last bit that is the bulk of the last half of the book since it's plain who the killer is but the where is the mystery.

I very much liked Marigold. She's smart and resourceful. Isabella, Ethyl and Cab are all fun characters too. So why not five stars? A few things. Marigold for all her logic does blow up emotional a lot. She also repeats one should not make too much of oneself way too many times for my tastes. But the biggest quibble is her schooling. It is nearly forgotten for too much of the novel. I found this annoying especially after so much was made of how much she needed to make up. It would have been easy to weave it in.

What I very much liked: Marigold's attitude and dedication to the education of women and women suffrage. I'm a student of women's suffrage and accomplishment in science from the 1800s-mid 1900s especially. So this mystery series is right up my alley. I am looking forward to the next one in the series.



View all my reviews