A sixty-fifth birthday celebration aboard a boat, a million-dollar watch, and a tangled web of characters apparently after a self-storage mogul’s money: these are the ingredients of local Chautauqua reporter and amateur detective Mimi Goldman’s latest puzzle. When the wealthy Simon Cole throws a party on the Chautauqua Belle, almost all the attendees come down with food poisoning and Simon is the only one who doesn’t recover. His death triggers a flurry of questions about his relationship with Jeanine Davis, a nurse’s aide he's been dating (despite their large age gap) and whom Mimi has already been scrutinizing at the behest of Simon’s daughter.
Mimi is in her sixties herself, and her assistant Sylvia is thirty years her senior, but this doesn’t stop either of them from pivoting to a full-fledged murder investigation. The combination of their determination and Chautauqua’s small-town neighborliness allows them to go where the police—who refuse to even consider Simon’s death a murder at first—cannot, including into other people’s homes when they leave their doors unlocked. Both women are well-rounded characters with detailed home lives that add to their realism and, occasionally, supply solutions to their burning criminal questions. Take this passage, for instance: “When chasing justice, Mimi became a woman obsessed. It was her thing. What she was good at. Maybe even her calling or bashert (Yiddish for destiny, usually meaning a soulmate, but also a fated life path) after being raised by loving but severely damaged Holocaust-survivor grandparents.”
While the novel’s action moves slowly, it never drags nor loses the reader among the many characters who are swiftly introduced at the beginning at Simon’s party. A handy list of names at the beginning can help reorient someone at a moment’s notice, though the suspects are so distinct that this may never be needed. The culprit’s identity is surprising but not un-justified, as each person appears equally capable of committing the murder. The explanation of their methods leaves something to be desired, however, given the improbability of the easy resemblance between the murder weapon and the other items used to disguise it. Along with the confusingly formatted screenshots of Mimi’s texts (which make it difficult to discern who is speaking), this is the only significant flaw in a book that is largely successful.
A successful twelfth entry in Deb Pines’s reliably entertaining series, TOSSING SEAS: A Chautauqua Murder Mystery is an exciting novel that belies the surface-level calm of its New York resort town setting by revealing the dangerous currents just underneath the waves.
—Gina Elbert for IndieReader