Book Review: A Dollhouse to Die For by Cate Price
The first thing that came to mind before I started reading this installment, was how one of my friends would become frustrated with doing miniatures. I don’t think she ever did dollhouses, but I remember one day at lunch she had spent many hours making the fruit for a shadow box.
I thought she was crazy.
But, it seems that there are many people who are into miniatures as evidenced in this installment. I would surely go crazy trying to make miniatures.
This installment starts with Harriet Kunes coming into Daisy Buchanan’s antique notions shop. She demands that Daisy sell her the dollhouse Daisy won at an auction in the first installment. Daisy refuses the phenomenal price that Harriet is offering and leaves the shop.
Later that night, she and her husband Joe go to Harriet’s because someone broke into the store and tried to steal the dollhouse.
What they find is a dead Harriet, electrocuted by another one of Harriet’s houses (these houses have everything). The question now is who murdered Harriet and is the murder connected to Sophie Rosenthal’s subtle death in the first installment?
Sophie’s nephew comes to town as the sole heir and shakes up Daisy’s life when he informs her that he’s raising her rent and do to the rent hike, she’ll probably lose the store.
As Daisy begins to investigate Harriet’s murder, she also has to figure out what to do with her own life.
I have to admit that I was looking forward to reading this installment since the miniature world has never been done as a crimozy and it seemed like a strange world of obsessed collectors. Price does do a great job with the characters and goes into a world of imagination.
She also does a good job of combining the two books since you don’t get the feeling that Sophie’s death is connected to Harriet.
On the downside, there were still too many characters to keep up with and there were some editorial errors that were not caught.
The pace again was slow and at times I really didn’t care what was going on. In fact, there was no buildup to the end. Before I knew it, the murderer was revealed and maybe subconsciously, I knew who it would be.
If subtlety is the key in these two installments, then I have a feeling of how the series will end.
