Murder Outside the Lines (Pen & Ink Mysteries #3) by Krista Davis

Murder Outside the Lines
by Krista Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Description (via GoodReads):

With Halloween just around the corner, the fall colors in Georgetown are brilliant. As manager of the Color Me Read bookstore, coloring book creator Florrie Fox has arranged for psychic author Hilda Rattenhorst to read from Spooktacular Ghost Stories. But the celebrity medium arrives for the event in hysterics, insisting she just saw a bare foot sticking out of a rolled-up carpet in a nearby alley. Is someone trying to sweep murder under the rug? Florrie calls in her policeman beau, Sergeant Eric Jonquille, but the carpet corpse has disappeared without a trace.

Then in the middle of her reading, Hilda chillingly declares that she feels the killer’s presence in the store. Is this a publicity stunt or a genuine psychic episode? It seems there’s no happy medium. When a local bibliophile is soon discovered missing, a strange mystery begins to unroll. Now it’s up to Florrie and Jonquille to expose a killer’s true colors . . . 

First Line:

The crate was delivered to Color Me Read around noon on Thursday.

It’s Spooky Time in Georgetown in the third Pen & Ink Mystery. Florrie Fox is comfortable in her renovated carriage house home, her job as bookshop manager, and her other job creating adult coloring books. So, naturally, things take a turn for the wacky. A human skull arrives in the deliveries. Strange noises come from nowhere. The celebrity psychic booked for an author event shows up claiming she just saw what might be a murder victim, but there is no corpse to be found.

In addition to the present-day mystery, a 200-year-old ghost story is told in pieces, eventually tying into the main story and adding to the atmosphere. In the end, of course, all the seemingly-supernatural happenings get rational explanations. Well, mostly.

This is a fun addition to the series. I only wish I’d read it in the fall for the proper mood. I’ve read both of the previous volumes, but it’s been a while, so I don’t really remember the details. I didn’t really need to, though; there’s enough information in the text to bring readers up to speed on the important things without doing a full recap of everything that’s happened. There’s also a “Cast of Characters” in the front that I found very useful.

There is an ongoing thread about the disappearance of a child (the daughter of Florrie’s boss) years ago that I hope gets some resolution eventually. That was one detail that I had completely forgotten about, so when a reference to it popped up, it was jarring. If harm to children is a no-go for you, dear reader, you might want to skip this series. Other than that, I really enjoy these cozy mysteries and look forward to the next book, A Colorful Scheme, currently slated to publish in August 2022.

Source: Checked out from my public library

Challenges: Read Harder 2022 Task #2: Read a book set in a bookstore