Shadows at the Spring Show by Lea Wait (First Edition)

In a fourth installment of a popular Agatha-nominated series, antique print dealer and American history professor Maggie Summer organizes an antiques show to benefit a local adoption agency and begins to fear for her safety in the wake of threatening phone calls and letters. By the author of Shadows on the Ivy. 15,000 first printing.

With complex crimes and even more complex personal decisions for Maggie Summer, antique-print dealer and history professor, the fourth installment of Wait's cozy series (after 2004's Shadows on the Ivy) doesn't disappoint. Since Maggie is thinking about adopting a child, she volunteers to organize an antique fair, the proceeds of which will go to support a local New Jersey adoption agency. Everything is running smoothly until the adoption agency begins receiving threatening letters—cancel the antique fair or else. Meanwhile, Holly Sloane, a saintly woman who's adopted 11 children, is shot, and one of her adoptive sons goes missing. Are the threatening letters and the shooting connected? Maggie must also ask herself some hard questions about her future. Her beau, Will Brewer, is a dreamboat, but he doesn't want to be a dad. Maggie knows that if she adopts, their romance will stagnate or end. Kudos to Wait for tackling a pressing social issue like adoption: she's never heavy-handed, and she just might inspire some readers to think about opening their homes to children in need.
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Maggie Summer is directing all her energy toward managing a print and antiques show to raise funds for Our World Our Children, an adoption agency. Maggie, in her late 30s, is thinking seriously of adoption herself, although her current beau is completely uninterested in having or raising children. After the mother of a rainbow circle of adopted kids is shot, one of her children disappears, and OWOC--and Maggie--gets threatening mail and phone calls. The missing child turns up dead, and Maggie's van is blown up. Who could hate OWOC so much? Characterization is on the thin side in this fourth entry in Wait's Shadows series; instead of full-bodied people, we get detailed descriptions of how adoptions work emotionally and what agencies look for in families and in single parents. Still, Wait is a supple writer, and the print lore she always includes in her tales is captivating. A slight misstep in an otherwise appealing series. GraceAnne DeCandido
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