Murder at the Spelling Bee by Lee Hollis

Available: May 21, 2024

Rated: 5 spellers

Maya and Sandra have been approached by the parents of a spelling bee participant to find out who is threatening their son to drop out of the upcoming competition. They quickly find out who delivered the note and the parents are satisfied with that but the women can't rest until they know who was actually responsible. Meanwhile an unpopular local teacher who is taking out all of life's frustrations on a few targeted students gets murdered at the spelling bee and when Sandra, whose son was one of the unlucky few, is pegged as suspect #1 the women switch gears. Who killed everyone's least favorite teacher? Was she responsible for the nasty note? Did the note have anything to do with her death?

Lee Hollis is one of my favorite cozy authors. Even though Maya and Sandra are probably my least favorite of the series Hollis writes, I still love them. I also have to give Rick Copp huge credit for how he writes female characters. Not many men can write believable and sympathetic female MCs and I would venture to say no one writes a cozy MC of the opposite sex as well as Copp does. Maya and Sandra are great, they're strong, smart, capable, independent women. Copp also does a great job of portraying super-hateable suspects that are actually very ordinary people.

One thing that's been interesting to me with this series is that the main characters are in such flux. Maya's husband was in prison and now he's out, Sandra has been going through a divorce and is now dating, their children are becoming adults and both women are about to be empty nesters. There's heavy stuff going on and though these two women, a former cop-turned-PI and a former Sentator's wife, don't seem to have anything in common they're banded together. Now that their kids are going off to college I'll be really interested to see how everything plays out.

Murder at the Spelling Bee is fast-paced and there's never a single moment of rest between interviews and information gathering and investigation. You'll be on the edge of your seat waiting to see how it all shakes out and to answer the question, who wrote the note?!?

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.