The Alpine Nemesis: An Emma Lord Mystery

This whole series is terrific and I always look forward to the next installment. Even with the surprise twist at the ending, I truly enjoyed it. However, my only problem with this series is the character of Vida. In the beginning, she was kind of fun in an ornery sort of way. Now she's become such a stuffy, snippy pain in the butt that I'm surprised one of the townfolk hasn't done her in themselves.

This is the best entry yet in the Alpine series. What an ending...hurry Ms. Daheim, I can't wait for the next one!

A recent dearth of reportable happenings in Alpine, Washington has Advocate editor Emma Lord gnashing her teeth in frustration as she tries to make newsworthy bricks out of banal, local straw in this latest addition to Ms. Daheim's beautifully-crafted series of domestic mysteries. Scooped by her media competitor Spencer Fleetwood on the last major story in the area...the mysterious disappearance of a snowboarder some two months prior to the events of this novel...Emma is trying hard to even the professional playing field while making up her mind about how to handle her recently rekindled romance with Tom Cavanaugh, the father of her son Adam, who is now very much back in her life with marriage on his mind. However, it's never quiet in Alpine for long, and when a long-simmering local feud suddenly heats up and bullets start flying, Emma and the rest of her loyal staff are on the spot in more ways than one. Intricate plotting is one of Ms. Daheim's fortes, so it's no surprise to the reader when an unexpected corpse shows up to further complicate the body count while other bodies suddenly start disappearing. Once she uncovers the connecting link between these unlikely occurances, the plot takes a tragically international turn, and Emma is forced to pay a terrible price for unmasking a well-hidden conspiracy of terror and death and bringing its perpetrators to justice. In many respects, THE ALPINE NEMESIS is probably the strongest...certainly the most emotionally engrossing...novel in the series to date and case in point that, in Ms. Daheim's skilled hands, the 'cozy' has indeed come of age. With a plot premise as engrossingly current as today's headlines, even her peripheral characterizations seem deeper and more three-dimensional than is generally true of the genre. This is a wonderful stand-alone read and should provide a powerful incentive for any reader who wants both content and character in hir mystery fiction to pick up Emma Lord's other adventures and savor them all.

In the 14th outing in this fine cozy mystery series, 'Alpine Advocate' editor Emma Lord's life is changed forever. Emma must track down a multiple murderer, beat off news competition from the local radio station owner, and make a personal life-altering decision. A little darker than most of the earlier books in the series but filled with the same wonderful Alpine atmosphere, "Nemesis" is a strong outing for the plucky Emma and her creator, Mary Daheim. The book stands alone, but the reader can benefit from having read the earlier Advocate entries.

Hard news is scarce in the small town of Alpine, Washington. This forces Emma Lord, owner and publisher of the weekly Alpine Advocate, to scramble to find a lead story for the front page. She thinks she?s going to have to settle for putting a story about public toilets coming to Alpine, but thinks that stinks as a headliner. Soon the biggest story to hit the small town starts breaking. The Hartquists and the O?Neills have been feuding for generations, but nobody expected that the remaining Hartquists would kill the three O?Neill brothers and put them in the butcher?s freezer. Emma gets the scoop and her front page story thinking that all that?s left is to watch the Hartquists react during the trial. However, the story is just beginning and the subsequent events that take place in the pretty bucolic town will change Emma?s life forever. THE ALPINE NEMESIS is an exciting small town mystery starring a likable heroine and a fully developed cast of characters. Readers are given an inside look into small town living and how to run a weekly periodical. This is not a straightforward mystery but a tale with so many layers that, in actuality, it is a complex and totally absorbing read.Harriet Klausner