Custard's Last Stand by Tamar Myers, a review

The book: Hysterical.

The author: Worth reading again.

Review:

I picked up Custard's Last Stand on a lark after my local librarian accused me of not being able to take out a mystery unless food was somehow involved. I had read all of my usual go-to food mysteries, and had picked this one up because it's title caught my eye. When the line underneath the author's name read "A Pennsylvania Dutch Mystery with Recipes," I decided this would be my designated food-related mystery.

I left this book until the others I had checked out were completed. Honestly, I was not overly convinced I wanted to read anything that was Pennsylvania Dutch. Then again, if I knew the main character, Magdalena Yoder, was going to have lines that would make me laugh out loud, I would have made this my first selection to read.

Whatever I had heard about the Pennsylvania Dutch clearly did not prepare me adequately to meet Magdalena. I was expecting something a lot more, um, straitlaced and serious. I was not expecting someone who wails out her frustrations, has to slap herself for her snarky comments, or who gives out her measurements (33-32-33) as a confirmation number to certain select guests at her inn. I found myself laughing far more than I should have at unexpected comments.

The basic plot of the book is that a gentleman who is staying at Magdalena's inn winds up murdered, and it is up to our heroine to figure out Whodunit before she becomes one of Whodunit's victims. In and of itself, this is not a unique story, and the cast of characters certainly seems to be full of just about every stereotype imaginable, most of them less than intelligent. It is a sign of my own lack of intelligence that it took me the vast majority of the book before I realized the joke behind one of the character names. (It was Miss Anne Thrope, in case you were curious. I am so ashamed that I missed something so glaringly obvious that was first mentioned on page four. I can only excuse myself by stating that I play an online game where people choose play-on-word names all the time so I tend to gloss over them. My own "Murphy Brawn" is one of those examples.)

I have no idea what made me enjoy this book, but I did. The stereotypes and random dumb characters should have made me roll my eyes and never want to read another book by this author again. However, I found myself laughing. Tamar Myers clearly has a very active imagination. Whereas I have heard of scary, deaf, old piano teachers who would grab your ear to tweak as punishment, I had never heard of someone training a small dog to stay quietly in their bra in order to fake bulk in that department. It was the randomness of some of the descriptions that kept me rushing to finish reading this book. I look forward to experiencing more Pennsylvania Dutch mysteries in the future.