A Shadowy Mystery

Author Laurel Peterson weaves a tangled web in Shadow Notes. Clara Montague dreams her mother is in terrible danger and returns home to Connecticut after being away for 15 years. Clara has always been intuitive and she failed to act on her intuition in which she saw her father's death many years before. She refuses to let that happen again to her mother.

When her mother's therapist and former lover Hugh Woodward is murdered, Constance is arrested for murder. Clara discovers a second set of notes Hugh made called Shadow Notes and steals them from Hugh's home. Before she can read them, they are snatched from her hands.

Constance won't talk about the case or her past, so Clara decides to investigate by asking questions of her mother's friends (and enemies). No one wants to discuss the trauma from Constance's past and Clara becomes more and more frustrated.

Old friend and now enemy Mary Ellen Winters implies that

Constance has some secrets in her past she might not want revealed. This just forces Clara to take risks and dig deeper. The more she digs, the tighter the weave becomes not offering her any insight into what has been going on,

Shadow Notes is not really a cozy mystery, but more a psychological mystery. When a loose thread appears and Clara pulls it, the weave tightens leaving Clara frustrated and the reader trying to figure out what is painstakingly being revealed.

Although Shadow Notes is not the usual type of mystery I read, I enjoyed it and the end is neatly packaged. For other books by this author, click here.