The Crepes of Wrath

Tamar Myers

I hate to say it, but I've binged a little too much on Tamar Myers over the last eight months. Like consuming too many ice cream sundaes all at once, the feeling you get after finishing your last one is more uncomfortable nausea than pleasure. When you've read four or five PennDutch mysteries in a concentrated amount of time, all the wailing will eventually get to you.

To be fair, Magdalena does do a lot less wailing in this book, but replaces it with various other W-words. One wonders, idly, which letter of the alphabet Myers will be abusing next in Magdalena's quest to solve the various crimes too complex for her stupid brother-in-law, Chief of Police Melvin Stoltzfus, to get his head around. In this case, a teetotaling Amish woman has keeled over from an overdose of angel dust; too busy with his campaign to bother, Melvin asks Magdalena to take the case. Not that she doesn't have an innful of weirdos to deal with, as usual, and her tentative relationship with a guy who's not only from out of town, but Jewish to boot. You can almost hear her mother rolling over in her grave. (Magdalena does, more than once, in the course of this novel).

Tamar Myers is getting more scurrilous as time goes on (there's rather a large number of double-entendres involving Magdalena's pet kitten Little Freni; methinks Myers has developed a perfectly reasonable fondness for the British sitcom Are You Being Served? in recent years), which is always a good thing, and the book's as readable as ever. Actually, I liked it better than the earlier PennDutch mysteries I've read; Myers is getting more of a sense of how to plot as time goes on, leading to less explanation-of-the-mystery at the end (here, there's only about half a page of "aha! This is how I knew you were the killer!"). But be warned, dear reader, an excess of empty calories can lead to a tender stomach. Take Magdalena in small doses.