Ministry is Murder by Emilie Richards

A couple of months ago I stumbled across a book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble which looked familiar. Picking it up, I saw that it was part of a series—Ministry is Murder by Emilie Richards. I knew that I had read the first book in the series several years ago, and looking back through my notes, I see that I read Blessed is the Busybody in 2006. I'm pretty sure that at the time I didn't know that it was the first in a series. So, standing there in the store I snatched up all the other books in the series and set them into my massive TBR stack.

In June, I needed to find a Cozy Mystery to use in a swap at BookObsessed, and I figured that if I offered 3 books and only won one, then I'd slowly be reducing the number of books in this house. Turns out that the 3-for was popular and I'll be mailing them to Shaunesay in a couple of weeks. Of course, once the swap was over, I needed to quickly read these books or resign myself to mailing them unread. It's rare that I'll part with a book that I haven't read, so I settled down to read books 2-4 in Richard's Ministry is Murder series. And, now that I've finished reading these three, I have three other books that I also owe her and I'll save on postage (and aggravation) by shipping them all at the same time.

Oh my! What a pleasure! I definitely like Aggie Sloan-Wilcox, Ed, her Unitarian-Universalist husband-pastor, her two daughters, Teddy and Deena, and her unconventional mother, Junie Bluebird. When a dead body is found on the porch of the parsonage in Blessed is the BusyBody, Aggie discovers that her tenacity in researching and searching out the truth means that she's also a good amateur detective. Although she tries to settle back into as much obscurity as a minister's wife can have in a small town, she keeps finding herself at the heart of every murder and its subsequent investigation.

I'm very pleased to discover that a fifth book is scheduled to be published in October. I'm definitely intending on purchasing it.