THE BODY IN THE BOOKCASE (Katherine Hall Page)

It's funny how a couple of years away from an author causes you to notice little things that you never did before!  I love Page's Faith Fairchild series.  Faith Sibley is a native New Yorker, daughter of a clergyman, who falls in love with handsome Tom Fairchild before she realizes that he is exactly what she had hoped to avoid, a man of the cloth like her father.  She and Tom marry and settle in Aleford, MA, a suburb of Boston, where they raise their two small children in the vicarage while Tom tends to his flock and Faith tends to her catering business, Have Faith.  Faith, in the grand tradition of cozy mysteries, manages to stumble upon a dead body every couple of months and cannot resist investigating.  Here she has a personal stake in solving the crime:  her neighbor, gentle retired librarian Sarah Winslow, has died  during home invasion and thieves with the same MO have burglarized the vicarage, making off with many Sibley and Fairchild family heirlooms, jewelry, and sentimental trinkets. 

Since the police seem rather casual about attempting to find and recover her family's stolen goods, Faith, enlisting the help of neighbors, friends, and even the reluctant Tom, takes matters into her own hands and begins combing pawn shops, auctions, and other places that might lead to clues as to who burglarized their homes and killed Sarah.  Business as usual must go on, however, and Faith is also caught up in planning food for demanding bride Samantha Bullock's society wedding and rehearsal dinners (this is a culinary series, after all!).

I suddenly realized while reading this that Faith has a certain Lucille Ball-like quality that I had never noticed before, keeping details from her husband and putting herself into situations that are both dangerous and comical.  Though she is a devoted wife and mother, I kept wondering how she could endanger herself and her family life by getting too closely involved with the investigation, but I guess that's one of the things that define a cozy.  She does, to her credit, enlist the aid of her state policeman friend John Dunne in critical decisions.  

One of the things that is so endearing about Faith is that she is a real woman, one whom most of us could identify with.  She is not a hilarious caricature like Agatha Raisin (M.C. Beaton) or Helma Zukas (Jo Dereske) or a wealthy philanthropist like Olivia Limoges (Ellery Adams), or even a cheerful crocheter/events organizer like Molly Pink (Betty Hechtman), although I LOVE all of these characters.  Faith is a working small-town mother who has left behind a more glamorous life in new York City to raise a family as the wife of a small-town vicar.  She worries about child care, picks her kids up at nursery school, and worries about Tom's sermons.  Page does an excellent job of making Faith a real (despite the Lucille ball moments), mother and wife.  She is someone that might live on my street, except for the murders!  I like her.