Small town sleuth Larkin Day steps in at the last moment as Interim Artistic Director at the local Summer Shakespeare Festival. The previous director having run off with the actress due to play the female lead in the planned production of “Romeo and Juliet”. Larkin is going to give it her very best shot. This is “Larkin’s Best Self” in action and with on-again-off-again boyfriend Ed now firmly in the “on” position even the poisoning of her Romeo isn’t going to derail things. But then another murder occurs and Larkin realises that she’s got to crack the case if the show is going to go on at all. As Rebecca, the Assistant Props Master, describes it, “Romeo and Juliet” is basically, “Pile of corpses, the end.” Only nobody expected the corpses to be real.
This is the third book in Nicole Dieker’s hugely entertaining Larkin Day series. Written with a sly sense of humor and a fine ear for witty dialogue, SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK WITH MURDER races along with more than a few twists and turns in the ‘whodunnit’ style plot. Dieker’s ability to juggle a large cast of characters is still in place as is her talent to switch skilfully between drama and comedy. The undoubted star of the show of course is Larkin whose skills of deduction are driven by a fine eye for the foibles of the people around her. At one stage she hints at the similarities between detection and drama, “This is why we do theater. To understand how a person becomes who they become. Why they make the decisions they make. How the people around them affect their choices.”
Regular readers will enjoy catching up with Larkin and her coterie. Things have moved on a touch since the excellent previous novel “Like, Subscribe, And Murder.” New readers may do better to begin with that, or indeed the series debut “Ode To Murder”, to get fully up to speed with Larkin’s particular world view but wherever they start their journey with her they’ll be happy to have made her acquaintance.
SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK WITH MURDER is the third book in Nicole Dieker’s impressive Larkin Day series that finds the title character as charming as ever in a plot that manages to blend Shakespearean subterfuge and murder with petty small town jealousies and problematic wi-fi.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader