Jill Churchill
Jane Jeffrey series
2 Nov 2024
When Jane Jeffrey, a recently widowed suburban mother of three kids, and her best friend Shelley, who lives next door, are confronted with the murder of Shelley's substitute cleaning lady in Grime and Punishment, they decide to lend the police a hand in solving the case, uncovering a lot of nasty secrets in Jane's suburban Chicago neighborhood in the process. Jill Churchill's books are in the "cozy" sub-genre of mystery fiction; the books are woefully deficient on police procedural methods, but they're written with style and humor and tend to be good fun. Grade: A.
4 Nov 2024
An old friend of Jane's has come to visit with her newly discovered son, whom she had given up for adoption, in tow in A Farewell To Yarns. The young man is graceless and downright churlish, and when the friend is discovered stabbed to death, Jane and Shelley wonder if the young man was the intended victim if not in fact the murderer. When he is also murdered, they have to reformulate their theories. The police procedures at the end of the book are so ludicrous that they spoil an other wise entertaining book, an unfortunate characteristic of the "cozy" sub-genre. Grade: B, mostly because of the clunky ending.
6 Nov 2024
When an odious member of the writing class Jane and Shelley are taking is murdered after consuming food supplied by Jane in A Quiche Before Dying, Jane has to interpret some obscure clues to find the killer. Grade: B.
7 Nov 2024
In A Knife To Remember, Jane and Shelley's back yards have been rented out to a film company making a movie in the vacant land behind their houses. Jane overhears a prop man blackmailing someone in the cast; when he is murdered a short time later, she and Shelley again lend a hand to the police to track down the killer. Grade: B.
8 Nov 2024
In From Here To Paternity, Jane and Shelley and their families visit a Colorado ski resort that Shelley's husband Paul is considering as an investment. Also at the resort are a conference of genealogists, descendants of immigrants from an obscure Balkan country, some of whom believe that the current owner of the resort is the rightful Czar of Russia, who is currently beset by a local tribe of Native Americans. Naturally several murders occur for Jane to sort out. I liked this one because Jane arrives at the solution using some basic genealogical methods. Grade: B.
12 Nov 2024
Jane's son Mike has a summer job in a newly opened deli in Silence of the Hams, where an obnoxious local attorney is discovered dead under a rack of hams during the grand opening of the store. When the attorney's paralegal is found murdered after attempting a spot of blackmail, Jane and Shelley put their heads together to figure out who dunnit. Grade: B.
War and Peas finds Jane and Shelley involved in the affairs of the local museum, dedicated to the agricultural discoveries of the late "Pea King". When the director of the museum is murdered during a reenactment of a Civil War battle, Jane and Shelley again get to work to solve the mystery. Grade: B.
13 Nov 2024
Jane and Shelley are part of a committee to check out a remote conference center in Wisconsin for a high school summer camp program in Fear of Frying. As they are stumbling around in the darkness in search of Jane's wristwatch, they find the dead body of one of the committee members. But when they report it to the local sheriff, the body has disappeared, only to resurface later, very much alive. Grade: B.
14 Nov 2024
As if the garish display and blaring music from the new neighbors next door wasn't enough of a headache, The Merchant of Menace finds a scandal-raking TV reporter showing up on Jane's doorstep with a camera crew to record the Christmas carol singing of her neighborhood and dig up whatever dirt he can. On top of that, she has Christmas with her obnoxious former mother-in-law and her prospective future mother-in-law to look forward to this year. There's an odd feeling of nostalgia about this one, published in 1998: computers that operated with floppy discs and dial-up connectivity, kids who talked to their friends on landlines, and no Google to investigate the dubious past of the various suspects. Grade: B.
16 Nov 2024
Jane has taken the job of wedding planner for a wedding to be held at an old hunting lodge in Groom With A View and begins to regret her decision when the cast of characters begins to arrive; the bride's domineering father, the handsome but sleazy groom, two dotty aunts, assorted bridesmaids and a florist who's convinced that there is buried treasure on the property. Then the seamstress falls down the stairs, or was she pushed? Grade: C.
17 Nov 2024
Mulch Ado About Nothing finds Jane and Shelley signing up for a class in gardening, hoping it will inspire them to do something about their own gardens. When the instructor is severely beaten, they have to consider whether any of the other class members might be responsible for it. Grade: C.
18 Nov 2024
Shelley is considering taking on a job as decorator for the renovation of an old house she calls The House of Seven Mabels, although Jane reminds her that they're dormers, not gables. When the contractor is pushed down the basement stairs and killed, the mostly all female work crew are considered suspects. This one didn't really hold together for me. Grade: C.
19 Nov 2024
Jane and Shelley attend a mystery writers' convention held at a local hotel in Bell, Book and Scandal. Since Jane has now finished the novel she's been working on, she hopes to connect with an agent and an editor in the hopes of getting it published. When one of the editors is poisoned and an obnoxious book reviewer is assaulted, Jane and Shelley go to work to figure it out. This one spent a lot of time discussing the nuances of breaking into the publishing industry. Grade: C.
20 Nov 2024
In A Midnight's Scream, Jane and Shelley become involved with an amateur theatrical production as Shelley auditions caterers. Frankly, this one didn't hold together very well for me. Again, the police procedures were faulty. Grade: C.
21 Nov 2024
The Accidental Florist winds up the Jane Jeffrey series with her marriage to detective Mel Van Dyne. It's not a very engaging mystery; most of the book is spent setting forth in excessive detail Jane's planning the wedding and her efforts to thwart both her former mother-in-law and her new one. Grade: C.
I'm kind of glad to be done with the Jane Jeffrey series. The first few books were entertaining, but as the series progressed they became increasingly stuffed with domestic details that had nothing to do with the mystery, the characters became less realistic and the police procedures did not improve much. I'm wondering if perhaps Jill Churchill became so interested in researching and creating the Grace and Favor series set during the Great Depression that she simply churned out the Jane Jeffrey series just to keep it going.
23 Nov 2024
The new series starts with Anything Goes, published in 1999. Set in 1931 during the Great Depression, down and out socialites Lily and her brother Robert Brewster inherit a huge mansion on the Hudson River from their late great-uncle Horatio Brewster. That is, they sort of inherit it; it comes with the condition that they must live in the house for ten years with only short absences allowable each year, and the substantial fortune that goes with it is to be managed by the estate's lawyer, Mr. Prinney, who, along with his wife, also lives in the house. As they learn more about the house, Lily also learns that local opinion is that the boating accident in which their uncle died was not an accident, but murder. Grade: A.
26 Nov 2024
In order to make the huge mansion they're living in pay something for them to live on, Lily and Robert decide to host a gathering of fans of a best-selling but reclusive author Julian West in In The Still Of The Night. West turns out to be an embittered, sarcastic man, scarred both physically and emotionally by his service in the Great War. When one of the guests who claims to have known the author in the past is murdered during the night, Lily and Robert have to get to work to figure it out. Grade: B.
27 Nov 2024
Bodies keep popping up in unexpected places for Lily and Robert to find in Someone To Watch Over Me, including a mummified one Robert finds in an old ice house on the property. The main interest of this book though is the continuing portrayal of the effects of the Great Depression on the local population and the country as a whole, especially the violent suppression of the Bonus March on Washington, D. C. by veterans of WWI as witnessed by local reporter Jack Summer. I'm giving this on an A for that reason. Grade: A.
28 Nov 2024
A heavily disguised man appears at the mansion requesting to rent a room where he and others can meet in privacy in Love For Sale. Since he's offering to pay a hefty sum in cash for it, Lily accepts. When he's later found murdered and turns out to be a well known fundamentalist "preacher" with unsavory habits and a long list of enemies, suspects abound. Of even more concern to Lily and Robert, though, is the missing teacher for whom they are filling is as temporary teachers. Grade: B.
29 Nov 2024
Lily and Robert are again filling in as temporary employees, this time at a local nursing home where an elderly man is soon found murdered in It Had To Be You. The plot of this one just didn't make much sense to me, but the depiction of the effect of the Great Depression on the lives of the people involved continues to be excellent. Grade: B.
30 Nov 2024
Who's Sorry Now seems to be the last book in the Grace and Favor series. Siblings Lily and Robert Brewster meet a new resident, a tailor who recently arrived from Germany. Although he's a native born US citizen, his tailor shop is soon vandalized with a swastika and attempts are made to burn it down, mirroring the book burnings rampant in Germany at the time. When an inoffensive local man is killed, Lily and Robert step in to help solve the case. Grade: B.
I was sorry to see the Grace and Favor series come to an end; it was meticulously researched and well written, clearly conveying the economic and social distress of that period in history.
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