Beware of the Elephant

(Copy provided to The Kindle Book Review)

From Goodreads:
"For years, Ziggy Breener, Burnt Cove’s eccentric Can Man, has lived a simple life, riding his bicycle along the town roads to collect returnables.

Life gets a lot more complicated when Ziggy inherits a piece of prime waterfront land from the equally eccentric Myra Huggard.

Moving to a new neighborhood brings new friends as well as new enemies. Sadly, his friends turn out to be more dangerous than his enemies, especially when he’s presented with an elephant who moves into his backyard.

Things go from bad to worse when his new guest apparently kills somebody, and the elephantine suspect turns out to have a checkered past. Desperate, Ziggy persuades his friends, amateur sleuths Sarah Cassidy and Oliver Wendell to help prove the elephant’s innocence.

But if the pesky pachyderm isn’t the killer, then who is? Did the murder have something to do with a long-forgotten legend about buried treasure hidden on Myra Huggards’ land? Were Ziggy’s angry neighbors behind the death? Was there some darker motive?

These questions and more lead Sarah back to her tangled childhood relationship with the Huggards. Once again she finds herself having to confront painful memories from her past in order to solve an old mystery and find a modern-day killer."

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Beware of the Elephant is an easy-going mystery, full of aw-shucks residents and other oddities, light on plot but well-done in character development. But to the author's credit, no one is too stupid to live (even the victim!) and the entangled mysteries are solved satisfactorily.

The story relies heavily on the reader's affection for the collection of quirky characters that make up Burnt Cove, from the Russian mobster and his philandering wife to the former ER doc turned can-collecting beach bum and his foil, the preacher who moonlights as a logging truck driver. These characters are so eccentric that the main sleuths, Oliver and Sarah, could almost be sticks of wood in comparison. But, as they are romantically involved and Sarah is actually working through some baggage of her own, they held my interest well enough. The thing I appreciated the most was that the local law enforcement wasn't a yokel, though I wasn't sure at first. He was well-played and I was pleasantly surprised at his involvement in the mystery.

Beware the Elephant is not a thriller, nor is it action-packed. This is a cozy mystery with very little peril outside of the main murder victim. If you're looking for a heart-pounding read, move on. If you'd like a simple mystery to curl up with on a lazy afternoon, this will suit you just fine.

Gentle Reader Alert: There were a few swears, but nothing beyond a PG level.