{"id":7506,"date":"2018-10-08T06:43:41","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T10:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7506"},"modified":"2018-10-08T11:43:36","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T15:43:36","slug":"past-present-a-marketville-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7506","title":{"rendered":"****Past & Present: A Marketville Mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"By Judy Penz Sheluk \u2013This is the second in Judy Penz Sheluk\u2019s Marketville Mystery series, set in a small town outside Toronto, and the series establishes a cozy, warm-hearted atmosphere. As in her earlier book, Skeletons in the Attic<\/a><\/em>, the first-person narrator is Calamity (Callie) Barnstable.<\/p>\n

Along for the adventure are Callie’s friends Chantelle Marchand and Arabella Carpenter, owner of a nearby antiques shop (the protagonist in Sheluk\u2019s other series, the Glass Dolphin Mysteries).<\/p>\n

In this book, Callie and Chantelle team up in a new business called Past & Present Investigations, in which they hope to use Callie\u2019s research acumen and Chantelle\u2019s genealogical knowledge to help people find missing relatives. Arabella will help if someone brings in an old object related to the missing person, and Callie\u2019s retired librarian friend will do the archive searches.<\/p>\n

Callie vacillates between loving the business idea and fearing they will find nothing but dead ends, but Sheluk has written nicely three-dimensional characters that are game to try. Callie also faces an ongoing personal challenge. It seems she cannot escape the hostility of her grandfather. He has never forgiven her mother for marrying Callie\u2019s father who was, her grandfather felt, many ladder-rungs beneath her.<\/p>\n

Before long, Arabella sends Callie a potential client. Louisa Frankow\u2019s German grandmother, Anneliese, immigrated from England in 1952 on the ship Canberra<\/em>. A mystery surrounds her grandmother\u2019s death only a few years after that voyage. Family papers and photos and other clues to the grandmother\u2019s past are few, but Callie locates an ephemera dealer with relevant artifacts from voyages of that era\u2014much more glamorous than modern-day trans-Atlantic air travel, that\u2019s for sure!<\/p>\n

Callie and Chantelle capitalize on the growing online availability of genealogical databases, newspaper archives, and the like. You may be familiar with these possibilities, if you\u2019ve done some family research of your own, and Sheluk makes the search for Anneliese\u2019s past full of the thrill of discovering how the pieces fit. They learn that Anneliese was murdered, and her husband convicted of manslaughter (on very flimsy evidence, in Callie\u2019s view). He\u2019d been in prison only a few months when he was stabbed to death in the showers. If he was not guilty, as Callie suspects, the real murderer is responsible for two deaths.<\/p>\n

Sheluk includes a couple of features that require a bit of a leap of faith. She relies on a long-ago coincidence, which, granted, might have been more likely in the early 1950s when Toronto\u2019s population was a third its current-day size. And, she\u2019s helped by a psychic who interprets objects, and while Callie remains skeptical of the validity of psychic phenomena, the psychic\u2019s revelations help confirm her hypotheses about the crime.<\/p>\n

The murder in this book is many years old, but it has consequences for Louisa and Callie too, which makes it significant even without splattering fresh blood all over the pages. It\u2019s fun to watch Callie and her friends in action, and the book ends with the promise of another interesting case to come.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a quick and satisfying read for those who like cozy mysteries or are fascinated by the long tail of the past.<\/p>\n

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I get a few pennies to put in a jar to pay my WordPress bills. If you click the photo below to order this book, you\u2019ll help me fill the jar.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judy Penz Sheluk \u2013This is the second in Judy Penz Sheluk\u2019s Marketville Mystery series, set in a small town outside Toronto, and the series establishes a cozy, warm-hearted atmosphere. As in her earlier book, Skeletons in the Attic, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Past & Present: A Marketville Mystery","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1335,52,41,126],"tags":[599,412,1412,1413],"class_list":["post-7506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-detective","category-crime","category-genealogy","category-reading-2","tag-judy-penz-sheluk","tag-mystery","tag-past-present","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1X4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7506"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7509,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7506\/revisions\/7509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}