Check out this new cozy mystery called Maggie Dove by Susan Breen! Read on for details, my review and a chance to win a $25 Amazon e-gift card!
Maggie Dove
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Publication Date: July 27th, 2021
Susan Breen introduces a charming series heroine in this poignant and absorbing cozy mystery with a bite. Maggie Dove thinks everyone in her small Westchester County community knows everyone else’s secrets. Then murder comes to town…
When Sunday School teacher Maggie Dove finds her hateful next-door neighbor Marcus Bender lying dead under her beloved oak tree—the one he demanded she cut down—she figures the man dropped dead of a mean heart. But Marcus was murdered, and the prime suspect is a young man Maggie loves like a son. Peter Nelson was the worst of Maggie’s Sunday School students; he was also her late daughter’s fiancé, and he’s been a devoted friend to Maggie in the years since her daughter’s death.
Maggie can’t lose Peter, too. So she sets out to find the real murderer. To do that, she must move past the grief that has immobilized her all these years. She must probe the hidden corners of her little village on the Hudson River. And, when another death strikes even closer to home, Maggie must find the courage to defend the people and the town she loves—even if it kills her.
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Excerpt
Maggie Dove wanted to be a beacon of light. She dreamed of being the sort of person who made others laugh, calmed crying babies, soothed wild dogs, inspired hopefulness. She wanted her life to be about something grand, yet every blessed thing that happened seemed designed to bring out all that was petty, cranky and small in her middle-aged self.
Take her neighbor, Marcus Bender. Maggie knew, intellectually, that he wasn’t an incarnation of Satan. He was just an annoying man. He was the sort of man who blew all his leaves onto her lawn each fall. He drove too fast down her quiet street, and once, when she had to jump out of the way of his car, she saw him laugh. He put a soccer net right up against her property so that every time his kids missed a goal, the ball went flying into her rose bushes. All of this, Maggie recognized, was insignificant. Petty. She tried to ignore it. She wanted to ignore it, and she might have succeeded had Bender not gone after her oak tree.
Maggie loved that oak tree. Her father planted it when she was a girl. She’d climbed on it. Her daughter had swung on its branches. She put ghosts on it for Halloween and lights on it for Christmas. Maggie loved the graceful shrug of its branches; she loved watching its little flowers unfold into leaves. She loved the little pods that floated over her lawn in the fall. Mostly she loved the way the tree linked her to her past and future. She would come and go, her daughter had come and gone, but the tree was as close to eternal as she was likely to see anytime soon.
Bender wanted her to move the tree. That was the sort of man he was. He thought you should move trees. It blocked his view of the Hudson River. He’d gone to considerable expense to remodel his house, which was the old Bell house, home of Maggie’s best friend growing up. He’d transformed the quiet little colonial into a Spanish style atrocity that looked like it had a dungeon in the basement. He had an art studio on the top floor, though he wasn’t an artist. He was a lawyer, but he had an artistic bent and wanted to paint studies of the Hudson River, and he didn’t want those studies blighted, as he said, by her oak tree. Blighted!
Maggie said no.
He offered her money. He had a lot of money and was willing to pay to get what he wanted. He seemed genuinely surprised to find there was a person in the world who didn’t care about what Bender wanted.
“We’ll work this out, Maggie,” he said, grinning at her in that wolfish way he had. He was a very good-looking man, athletic, muscular, tanned. He wore suits to work and his broad chest bulged against the constrictions of his shirt. Winifred Bell, who had once been Maggie’s neighbor, but was now confined to a nursing home because of Parkinson’s, was convinced that the source of Maggie’s anger was sexual desire, a conclusion Maggie thought so far off the mark, she didn’t even argue about it.
She didn’t like men like steam rollers. She liked gentle men, and gentle people. She loved her small town on the Hudson River and the people she’d grown up with and she loved that tree. There was no amount of money he could pay her to make it worthwhile to cut it down. She didn’t want to fight about it; didn’t want to talk about it. She just wanted to live her life and enjoy her tree.
Then, one April morning, Maggie went outside to see if any new leaves were starting to form. She loved those wispy little clusters that blossomed for a short time each spring, but as she neared the tree she was struck by a sharp odor. She saw a strange dark puddle at the base of the tree; bent down to sniff it and her nostrils burned. Poison. Bender was poisoning her tree.
My Thoughts
Thank you to the author for providing me with an ecopy of this book as part of this blog tour. When I read the synopsis for this book I thought it sounded like something I could end up liking. I then saw it was a cozy mystery which made me a little skeptical. Here’s the thing I have only read a handful of cozy mysteries and I’ve only liked the ones by one specific author and they are all in one series. So after agreeing to review this one I was worried going into it but I ended up liking it in the end. The author hooked me and made me want to find out who dun it which I ended up being able to guess probably about halfway through but there were some surprises thrown in there. It was a little heavy on the religious themes but for me personally that didn’t bother me. I didn’t really connect with any of the characters and I found the main character Maggie Dove to be very judgmental and hard to like at first. The plot of this book is what kept me reading. This sounds like the start of a series and I could see myself reading more books in the series but I wouldn’t be in any hurry to get to them. Overall this was a quick easy read that I am giving 3.5 stars.
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About the Author
Susan Breen best-selling Maggie Dove mystery series was first published by a digital imprint of Penguin Random House and in the process of being reissued in paperback by Under the Oak Press. She’s proud to have had two of her Maggie Dove stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. A new story will be in Malice Domestic’s upcoming anthology: Murder Most Diabolical (introduced by Walter Mosley.) She was also longlisted for the 2021 Margery Allingham Short Story competition. Susan’s first novel, The Fiction Class, won a Washington Irving Award from the Westchester Library Association.
Susan teaches novel-writing at Gotham Writers and she’s also on the faculty of the New York Pitch Conference. She lives in a very pretty little village on the Hudson River with her husband, two sweet cockapoo dogs and two rather aggressive cats. Her three grown children are flourishing elsewhere.
Author Links
Susan Breen | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
For a chance to win a $25 Amazon e-gift card, click on the link below!
Blog Tour Schedule
August 30th
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September 1st
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Misty's Book Space 
I did not know this was being republished. I was reading it as a backlist book. I have a copy from 2016. Nice, honest review Misty. I’m glad you ended up liking it after all your apprehension.
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I had never heard of it before now so I was thinking it was a new release at first. Thank you!!
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