Title: Murder Wears a Little Black Dress
Author: Debra Sennefelder
Series: Resale Boutique Mysteries #1
Publisher: Lyrical Press
Release Date: January 22, 2019
Pages: 205
Book Source: eBook
“After her rising career as a Manhattan buyer is derailed, Kelly has mixed feelings about relocating back to Lucky Cove, in spite of her big plans for the soon-to-be-renamed Curated by Kelly Resale Boutique. What’s left of her luck starts running out when a customer puts on a black lace dress that triggers visions of someone being murdered. As if the haunted “Murder Dress” isn’t enough to kill business, the psychic’s doppelganger cousin has just been found bludgeoned to death.
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Was Maxine LeMoyne the real target or was it a case of mistaken murder? With some creepy pre-Halloween bargain hunters walking the night and Kelly suddenly a person of interest, a second murder rocks the close-knit town. Now Kelly could be the one who ends up talking to dead people when she’s stalked by a killer determined to take her out in high style …” – Amazon
Kim’s Review
After having read (and enjoyed) Three Widows and a Corpse, book three in the Food Blogger Mysteries, my podcast partner for Books Don’t Review Themselves and I both decided we want to try Debra Sennefelder’s Resale Boutique Mystery series. I bought book one, Murder Wears a Little Black Dress, so I would be able to read it before book two, Silenced in Sequins, comes out on January 7, 2020.
I was intrigued by the synopsis because it reminded me of Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mysteries. The main character, Lily, owns a vintage clothes shop and she picks up vibes off of the clothing, which draws her into mysteries. The two worlds of the Witchcraft Mysteries and the Resale Boutique Mysteries couldn’t be more different though. Juliet Blackwell’s series in a supernatural cozy, while Sennefelder’s is not, it just happens to have some psychics in it.
I’m not a huge clothes person, mainly because being plus sized so many of the clothes don’t fit right or look like tents, so I don’t really enjoy clothes shopping. But reading Sennefelder’s descriptions of the clothes and accessories was still enjoyable for me and definitely added another level to the book.
For the first book in a series, the characters are already very well developed. Kelly’s best friend is always bringing over baked goods, her assistant loves her like a mother, and even her uncle, who seems to be a jerk, has a solid identity. There was a perfect amount of characters to have plenty of suspects and I wasn’t sure who the killer was, so that’s always fun for me. I hope we get more stories about Kelly’s grandma intertwined in future books.
Highly recommend Murder Wears a Little Black Dress! And I will be reading and reviewing book two, Silenced in Sequins. You should also check out Sennefelder’s Food Blogger series, starting with book one, The Uninvited Corpse.
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