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It Had to be You: A Grace & Favor Mystery    by Jill Churchill Amazon.com order for
It Had to be You
by Jill Churchill
Order:  USA  Can
William Morrow, 2004 (2004)
Hardcover
* *   Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth

In the fifth of her Grace & Favor series, Jill Churchill again brings murder to that tiny town on the Hudson. In 1933, Lily and her timid brother Robert fill in for an ill nurse at a nearby nursing home (this in the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration). When an already dying man suddenly expires suspiciously, everyone is suspected. Well, almost everyone. Certainly his grandsons and wife, who stand to inherit, seem likely to have done the deed.

The cozy is simply written, with every clue staring you in the face. The fun part for me was in realizing all the things we have today that we did not have at that time: cell phones, FM radio, plastic, computers, the internet, 911, and a plethora of other items too numerous to mention in this space. What we did have, in the period in which this story is set, was peace, a recovery from the depression, and an end to prohibition.

It Had to be You is easily read and enjoyed. It's neither complicated or devious ... I would like to know, though, what could have polluted that lake.

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