Love for Sale
A Grace & Favor Mystery, No. 4
By Jill Churchill

     Lily and Robert Brewster are back for a fourth installment. It's the Depression era. The Hoover Dam is being built and all communities suffer casualties because of it, including Voorburg-on-the-Hudson. Hoover and Roosevelt are running for President, and an anonymous group pays Lily a lot of money for rooms on the third floor of her rooming house. Lily assumes it's a radical political group. Robert worries it might be gangsters. Both wake up to the news of a murder on the third floor. She and Robert also learn that the group isn't political at all, but involved in a roundabout way of "Love for Sale."

     Although the mystery takes place at the Grace and Favor rooming house, Robert plays only a small part in the actual investigation. Instead, he teaches part-time at the local school. After the anonymous, well-paying boarder is found dead, Chief Howard Walker is called in to run the investigation, taking center stage in the mystery. Lily is the note-taker for Walker during the investigation. She also becomes familiar with more of the local women, and uses their knowledge to collect more information to help solve the murder.

     Churchill mixes mystery, history and life in a small community in her Grace and Favor series. With each title, lives change and relationships grow. In this one, the mystery takes center stage and is blended with some local storylines. Grace and Favor is one of those nice cozy series that make a reader feel at home while solving an armchair mystery. Other cozy mystery authors similar to Churchill are Kate Kingsbury, Laura Childs, Deborah Donnelly and Denise Swanson.