Cozy Monday

Twisted Threads (Mainely Needlepoint mystery #1) by Lea Wait (Kensington mass market paperback and e-book, 6 January 2015).

Angie left her hometown of Harbor Haven, Maine, as soon as she was old enough.  And she thinks she's successfully left it behind until she receives a voicemail from her grandmother Charlotte, saying that Angie's mother had been found.

Jenny Curtis had disappeared just before Angie's tenth birthday.  She'd left for a few days before, but she'd always come back.  When she didn't return for Angie's birthday party, Charlotte reported it.  She was never found.

That is, until ten years after Angie left, she thought, for good.  

Jenny's body had been found by one of Angie's contemporaries, in a storage unit Lauren had been going through a storage unit after her father's death.  

Though not a licensed private investigator, Angie had been working with one in Mesa, Arizona.  She decided that she wouldn't leave until she'd put her skills to use to learn just how her mother had ended up in Joe Greene's storage unit.  

The series title comes from the cottage industry that Charlotte had begun after she found she couldn't keep up with the number of custom needlepoint orders she was getting.  She'd hired some of the locals and called her company "Mainely Needlepoint".   She turned the front room of her house into a business office, which was the first of many changes that Angie discover about her old home.

Having lived in Maine for many years, Lea Wait knows of what she writes.  In Angie Curtis, she has created a strong resourceful protagonist, characteristics that we realize she inherited from her mother and grandmother. Being strong women means, of course that they are not perfect, and Wait has no compunction about writing them that way.  

Fans of craft-related mysteries will certainly devour this, as I did, and impatiently await the second book in the series.

FTC Full Disclosure:  I borrowed the e-book from my local library.