Donna Andrews. Between a Flock and a Hard Place. Minotaur, 2024.

We have reviewed a few Donna Andrews books on this blog. Between a Flock and a Hard Place is her latest. As with her other books, the plot involves serious crimes but with a touch of humor.

In this novel, narrator Meg Langslow is back home in Caerphilly, Virginia. A television crew is coming to town because the Smetkamp family has just won a network’s home remodeling competition. They are going to have their 1930s Sears house gutted and remodeled. Most people in town are excited for them, but there has been some opposition. Meg gets involved because she is a special assistant to the mayor.

Her ornithologist grandfather also gets involved because as the renovation team arrives in town, a flock of about 90 feral turkeys set up camp on the property that is to be repaired. Turkeys are aggressive and create quite a disturbance. These are not wild turkeys but domestic turkeys that have gone wild. They have no fear of people. They also tend to stay in one place, so people begin to immediately suspect that someone planted them there overnight.

Things get a lot more complicated. It turns out that the crew from Marvelous Mansions home makeover show knows little of construction. They remove a couple of load bearing walls, so the town has to declare the house unsafe for habitation. Meg offers the Smetkamps a guest bedroom at her house until the work is done. Mr. Smetkamp takes her up on the offer, but not Mrs. Smetkamp.

Across the street from the renovation lives Meg’s friend Gloria who rents out a couple of rooms to people. She rents out her attic space to a hard-core computer geek named Chris. She seldom sees Chris go in and out; he seems to stay in the attic most of the time. She has given up trying to carry on a conversation with him, and his first month there her electric bill rose $800 from all the computer equipment running. He did take care of that, but it does show us what a big operation he has in her attic. Although he seldom goes out, people have seen him watching the turkey antics from his upstairs window through binoculars.

At first the mystery is simply to find out who was behind the turkey transplant and how they did it. There also is the legal problem with the television crew and the building codes. And the mayor still has to deal with Charles Jasper, who used to live in the house and is now leading the opposition against the remodeling.

Those who read Lark! The Herald Angels Sing learned about the corrupt government in neighboring Clay County. There seems to a suspicious connection with Clay County here as well. And then Mr. Blomqvist, the leader of construction team suddenly leaves town—no one knows where he went, and none of the television or construction workers have been paid.

About halfway through Mrs. Smetkamp is murdered. It is clearly a murder since no one would stick a carpenter’s rasp through her neck accidentally or by suicide. The plot truly thickens.

As is true with many such cozy mysteries, no one likes Mrs. Smetkamp, including, it seems, Mr. Smetkamp.

The mysteries do take some time and persistence and luck to unravel. There are indeed several mysteries: the origin of the turkeys, where Blomqvist went, what Chris the computer guy is up to, and, of course, who killed Mrs. Smetkamp. The people involved are not necessarily related to each other or conspiring in any way, but they all come to a satisfying conclusion—though the plot goes in different directions, just as things usually do real life.