Dead Dancing Women (An Emily Kincaid Mystery)

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

Book Overview

Escaping the city, and her coed-chasing ex-husband, part-time journalist and full-time failed mystery writer Emily Kincaid has moved into a cozy cabin nestled in the woods of northern Michigan. Emily... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738712663
• ISBN13: 9780738712666
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Midnight Ink
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.3" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

One of the best!

I read a lot of mysteries. In fact, I'm addicted to them. I particularly appreciate those with interesting backgrounds, good plots, well-defined characters, and excellent writing. "Dead Dancing Women" does all of the above, and more: it has a delightfully humorous tone. A severed head in the garbage can? An ex-husband in a big-city sweater and Gucci loafers with a scarf around his neck? A neighbor who stews up road kill? A compound of off-the-grid militants? I live in Northern Michigan and I KNOW these people! They're real, yet they're laughable. I had a great time with this book and I'm anxious to read "Dead Floating Lovers", the next in the series.

Dead Dancing Women: Me in a More Exciting Life

I began Dead Dancing Women expecting to like Emily Kincaid. After all, I discovered the book by Googling my maiden name. It did not disappoint me. Emily's problems with eccentric but well-meaning friends, with pesky people from a past she's trying to escape, and with managing a home and new puppy on her own are like my problems and those of many of us. But Emily has the unique challenges associated with real crime-solving. These challenges often interfere with her attempts at mystery-writing, yes, but they provide a great story for Elizabeth Buzzelli!

"Dead Dancing Women" is a Page-turner From Beginning to End

"Dead Dancing Women" kept me turning the pages from the beginning of the story to the very end. Buzzelli's writing style makes it very easy to follow the story of Emily and her cast of friends and neighbors to the point where I finished the book in just a few sittings. The story weaves through potential suspects, leaving you to wonder "who dunnit" until the very end. Very good read.

Severed heads in a small town

Dead Dancing Women is the first installment in a new series featuring Emily Kincaid, an unsuccessful mystery writer who's moved up to the woods of northern Michigan to live and write in peace. Three years into the move, Emily has no regrets. Her life is tranquil, work on the latest unlikely-to-be-published novel interrupted by gardening, piecework for the area's second largest paper, and getting to know the locals--at least until she's dragged headlong, as it were, into a mystery. When we first meet Emily she's bringing her garbage cans in from the road, a chore that's attracted the attention of an unusual number of crows--menacing in their quanity and their fearlessness and their single-minded interest in the contents of her trash can.... Because she's the one to find the severed head, and because of her journalistic interest in the case, Emily quickly turns from being a failed mystery writer into an amateur sleuth. She winds up all but partnering with Deputy Dolly--fully half of the local constabulary--driving around town and interviewing the locals about the dead woman. There are a number of avenues to explore: arguments among neighbors that might have escalated into murder, a local pastor's fiery denouncement of what the dead woman and her friends had been up to in the woods, a bunch of survivalists who just might be strange enough to have killed the woman. Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli's debut mystery kept me interested to the end, though when it comes the solution to the puzzle is not very surprising. There's one loose end--regarding the condition of the first corpse discovered--that I would have liked tied up. But in general I enjoyed the read. Buzzelli has created an interesting circle of secondary characters--Emily's wacky neighbor Harry Mockerman, who's wont to stop by with the occasional batch of possum stew; her grating ex-husband Jackson, who's moving into the area and thus likely to be around for the next installment; the squat Deputy Dolly, who shows surprising flashes of femininity beneath her law-and-order exterior. I wouldn't mind visiting with these folks again. -- Debra Hamel