March Mystery: Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge by Ovidia Yu

There are a couple of copies of Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge up for grabs in the early review section of Library Thing and I would so like to snag one because I know it's not going to show up in my local library any time soon. (My local library is so strapped for cash that you're kind of out of luck if you don't want the new James Patterson or Debbie Macomber or Stephen King).  To be fair, it's available in a trade paperback priced under $15, which is about what it costs to go to a movie at my local theater, so one way or another, it's on my TBR list.

The book is set in Singapore where Aunty Lee is a widow who runs a "home cooking" restaurant. This is not the first of her adventures and I've already ordered Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials and Aunty Lee's Delights. I've always been a fan of feisty, crime-solving widows, from Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax to Cabot Cove's Jessica Fletcher.

P is for Mrs. Pollifax

Another of the mystery series I really liked were the "Mrs. Pollifax" books by Dorothy Gilman.  They weren't really mysteries so much as they were "cozy" spy novels. Emily Pollifax was a widow in her 60s who ended up recruited as a CIA agent. the series includes a delightful cast of recurring characters and there's a nice freindship that grows between Mrs. Pollifax and a young agent she works with.

Gilman was named a "Grand Master" by the Mystery Writers of America in 2010, two years before she died.  She also wrote a slew of other mysteries. I've read some but none of them engaged me as much as the Pollifax series. Rosalind Russell starred in a movie version of The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, and Angela Lansbury starred in a TV-movie version. I think the series would make a dandy television series, kind of a Scarecrow and Mrs. King for an older audience.  (Or put it another way, Murder, She Wrote with an international setting.)  The books might be a little old-fashioned and cozy for today's readers but I loved them.