Online Book Club: Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun by Lois Winston

Bonus points for a creatively gruesome murder weapon.

Anastasia Pollack’s career as crafts editor at a New York women’s magazine is a unique premise for a mystery series. In the opening pages, recently widowed Anastasia finds out her dearly departed hubby wasn’t the helpful partner she’d married. If possible, her life gets worse when a coworker is killed and guess who is the prime suspect? Bad luck sticks to Anastasia, well . . . like hot glue.

Surrounded by a hilarious cast of characters including two teenage sons, two obnoxious mothers and their pets, and helpful but bumbling coworkers, Anastasia has so much on her plate the reader genuinely questions whether she’ll find a way out of the mess. Especially when the mob gets involved.

I’ll admit, I was skeptical of this book at first.

Two reviews on the cover compared Anastasia Pollack to Stephanie Plum in the Janet Evanovich series. If you know anything about my reading tastes, you’d know that my mental vacation to Trenton, NJ to visit Stephanie’s friends and family is the highlight of my annual literary adventures. Could anyone write characters as memorable as Lula and Ranger?

But the reviewers were right.

This story is set in New Jersey with a cast of wacky family and friends, but Anastasia is an older, more mature answer to Stephanie Plum. The only way she can cope with the truly horrible things that keep messing up her life is to battle back using her wit and cleverness. Anastasia corrals her communist mother-in-law, clueless mother, and entitled sons to help out for a change, for cripes’ sake.

The mystery kept me laughing and guessing whodunnit until the end.

My mom borrowed this one and gave it two thumbs up, too. She says: “A refreshing change of pace with diverse characters and a plot with surprising twists and turns.  I especially enjoyed the parrot who had an appropriate quote from Shakespeare for any event!”

If you like solid mysteries filled with ironic one-liners, you’ll like this series. I’m excited to continue reading the rest of them. Lois Winston includes craft directions at the end for the projects mentioned in the book.

You can buy Assault With a Deadly Glue Gun here. It’s also available as an ebook download on Overdrive at my library, so you could check your library too.

Until next month, happy reading, friends!