The Body in the Basement

✍ Scribed by Page, Katherine Hall

• Book ID: 109197125
• Publisher: Avon
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 196 KB
• Series: Faith Fairchild 6
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

A Good Foundation ... For Murder

Pix Miller, Faith Fairchild's next-door neighbor, expects to find more than a hole in the ground when she goes to check on the progress of the summer cottage the Fairchilds are having built on Maine's Sanpere Island. She expects a concrete foundation. What she doesn't expect is a very dead body wrapped in a very valuable antique quilt! The deceased is a local handyman with a suspiciously lucrative sideline in antiques. Sharing her friend Faith's inquisitive nature, Pix resolves to restore Sanpere's shattered peace. But by digging too deeply the determined Ms. Miller just might be arranging another burial -- her own!

From Publishers Weekly

Featuring recipes, quilting lore and murder, Page's sixth entry in the Faith Fairchild series (after The Body in the Cast) centers around the Massachusetts housewife and caterer's next-door neighbor, occasional employee and friend, Pix Miller. Early in the summer on Sanpere Island, Maine, Pix and her daughter check the construction work on the Fairchilds' summer cottage and discover a quilt-wrapped body buried where the foundation will soon be poured. Dead is Mitchell Pierce, an antiques seller and house restorer with a host of enemies on the island. While her daughter begins work at the island summer camp, Pix wonders about the blue X stitched on the edge of the quilt in which the body was wrapped. As a series of pranks at the summer camp turns nasty (decapitated mice are left on a kitchen counter and red paint is splattered on boat sails), Pix begins asking questions and, although she often calls Faith with progress reports, ends up solving that murder and one that follows. This leisurely tale, with recipes for fish chowder, corn bread and blueberry tart, nicely frames the down-to-earth, eminently likable Pix, who proves an enjoyable stand-in for Faith.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A nasty surprise awaits Faith Fairchild's old friend Pix Miller when she goes to check on the construction of Faith's new summer house on Maine's Sanpere Island: There's a body carefully wrapped in a quilt hidden in the basement. Even though the contractor would soon have covered the corpse of itinerant restorer Mitchell Pierce in cement with no one being the wiser, still, as Pix's elderly mother sagely remarks, It's not the way one likes to start a new house.'' (Faith's own reaction:It'll be weeks before they let us continue.'') And the trouble on Sanpere has just begun: Pix's daughter Samantha finds three decapitated mice at her summer camp, a display of plastic bats with painted blood, and a gull with its throat slit. Sounds like decorator Valerie Atherton's incorrigible teen Duncan Cowley. But would Duncan really kill Mitch Pierce--or local celebrity quilter Adelaide Bainbridge, who's found wrapped in another quilt? Or are the crimes connected instead, as Pix suspects, to a ring of antiques forgers that may just include the off-island stranger who'd been so attentive to Addie? Though Pix does duty for barely-there Faith (The Body in the Cast, 1993, etc.), the mixture is otherwise familiar. Unremittingly nice suspects and down-east recipes establish a family-values backdrop for a killer who faces the need to kill Pix by fretting: ``Our parents used to play bridge together.'' -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.