No Body
No Body by Nancy Pickard 1986 Pocket Books Mystery
This is one of the books in a Jenny Cain Mystery series. Jenny runs a foundation and her sixth grade teacher, Lucille Grant, is president of the Cemetery Society. She discovers there are no bodies or coffins in the historical cemetery with markers dated from 1824 to 1848. She sprains her ankle and asks Jenny to investigate.
This minor mystery is a great method of introducing the characters and shifting to a murder. The funeral director Spitt Attman, his son, Stan and the other employees are introduced as they dig up other graves to prove someone is buried in the modern graves.
Jenny attends the funeral of John Rudolph, 38, who died of a heart attack. His wife, Muriel, wants the casket opened at the grave to make sure he’s inside. But he’s not alone. His mistress, Sylvia, is dead and buried with him. Now it becomes a murder mystery.
One of the grave diggers threatens Jenny. Her boyfriend is Detective Bushfield who is leaving for a week to attend a seminar. He wants Det. Ailey Mason to investigate the case by himself as a test of his skills. This is a good technique of using an inept police officer who is on the wrong track and motivates Jenny to do her own investigation into the murder.
Obnoxious reporter Lewis plans to interview Muriel who was upset about her husband’s funeral. Jenny agrees to join him, but they find Muriel dead at her kitchen table, strangled like Sylvia. She wrote a list of names of people at the funeral parlor on a napkin.
Lewis, hot for a story, joins forces with Jenny to interview the suspects. They follow the path Sylvia took the night before she died, first to a bar, then to a drug dealer, grave digger, then to a couple of employees. The reader follows along and uncovers a motive.
While investigating the murders, Jenny discovers what happened to the bodies and coffins and shares the information with the historical society and her teacher. A trap is set by Lewis and Jenny to find the murderer. The motive is interesting, and Pickard uses unique plot lines to keep the interest of the reader. She also brings in an additional threat at the end in a final confrontation.
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