Nail Biter: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

If you like this series, and I do, this is quite an OK book. A little more than usual of running blindly into stupidly risky situations, a bit too much for my taste, and more character stuff than clever plot development, but I find the characters OK. Some others in the series are better, but I wouldn't want to miss any so far and not this one either.

Sarah Graves' NAIL BITER features veteran audio narrator Lindsay Ellison's suave and moving voice which captures the underlying tension in the story of one Jacobia Tiptree, who faces a coven of witches renting her house and a preacher's murder.

As the 9th book in Sarah Grave's "Home Repair Is Homicide Mysteries", it is the best yet. The book made me laugh, as usual, and shed a tear or two as well. It appears to me that Ms. Graves just keeps getting better. Can't wait for number 10!

As the ninth book in this series, it's also the strongest. Graves' story is not filled with too many characters or too many plotlines. It's a compelling, fast-paced story with personal tragedy for Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree. Jake and her best friend, Ellie, have rented a small house to a "coven of witches." Within the month, a man is found murdered in their shed, drugs are discovered, and a teenage girl goes missing. Jake's own past pushes her to search for the girl, despite personal danger. It also pushes her to ignore the personal issues with her ex-husband. As Jake hurtles towards danger and disaster, the reader rushes along in this suspenseful story.

Having left Wall St. behind upon finding her spouse Victor cheating on her, and her son Sam using drugs, Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree divorced her husband and took her son to Eastport, Maine. There she eventually married Wade Sorenson and with her best friend Ellie White buy a beachfront fixer-upper with plans to lease the house especially when the tourists come to New England. Currently they rent the place out to a coven of amateur witches who Jake believes must have cursed Ellie and her as they seem to always need a repair or two at the most inopportune moments. While a storm rages, Jake, toolkit in hand, arrives at the cottage to make a repair. In the nearby tool shed, Jake finds the corpse of thieving street preacher Eugene Dibble. Everyone had a motive to see Dibble leave town but nobody knows who would go to the extreme of shooting him. After coven member ex-cop Jenna Durrell compromised the crime scene, the others claim they were busy conjuring so heard nothing over the storm. After another incident occurs, with Ellie helping Jake investigates. The latest "Home repair Is Murder" amateur sleuth mystery is an intriguing tale due to a strong who-done-it. Jake assumes one of the coven members killed Dibble, but finds no motive beyond that no one wanted the petty thief in town. Besides playing 1823 and dealing with Victor more than ever, Jake is at her tough best even when she and her partner deal with a NAIL BITER life and death crisis. Readers will take immense delight with Jake's investigation so she can further repair and lease her fixer-upper. Harriet Klausner