Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Our dear friend and fellow blogger, Lea Wait, wrote one last Mainely Needlepoint mystery before her death in August. Thread and Buried will be in stores November 26. Thanks to her publisher, Kensington Books, we have an Advance Reading Copy to give away to one lucky person who comments on this post between now and midnight on Tuesday, November fifth. Lea’s cat, Shadow, who now lives with me, will pick the winner.

Thread and Buried is the ninth Mainely Needlepoint Mystery, a series that started with Twisted Threads, in which Angie Curtis returns to Haven Harbor, Maine after ten years away. During those years, Angie worked as a private detective. Through the first eight books, she establishes a good relationship with the local police and the state police detective who handles homicides in her part of Maine. That comes in handy in this new mystery when a “suspicious death” occurs on the set of a movie scheduled to be shot in her small mid-coast community. Angie has useful contacts. Not only is she helping furnish the sets for the movie, an offshoot of her new career running Mainely Needlepoint, a business she’s taken over from her grandmother, but she’s romantically involved with Patrick West. His mother, a famous Hollywood actress, is the star of the movie and many of the key players are staying at her waterfront mansion for the duration of the shoot.

Kathy/Kaitlyn and Lea at Malice Domestic in 2016

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but suffice it to say that a death involving high profile people has the investigating officers anxious to cross every T and dot every I. That makes life miserable for all those connected to the production. Some are strangers to Angie, but others are people she cares about—characters who played key roles in previous entries in the series. Both Leo, who was at the center of the action in the eighth mystery, Thread on Arrival, and Ruth, one of the Haven Harbor residents who has been a regular in the series from the beginning, come under suspicion.

I will confess, knowing what Lea herself was going through while she was writing this book, I was a little concerned that it might not be as good as previous books in the series. I worried for nothing. True professional that she was, with a clever, inventive mind and incredible determination, she left us with yet another excellent mystery. There are plenty of twists and turns and a satisfying conclusion, plus a couple of tasty recipes added on at the end.

To win an ARC of Thread and Buried, leave your comment below. If you came to this blog from Facebook or some other platform, please be aware that leaving a comment there will not be enough to enter you in the drawing. Only people posting comments directly to MaineCrimeWriters.com are eligible. Best of luck, everyone. It’s a terrific read.

With the June 2019 publication of Clause & Effect, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty books traditionally published. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.