Murder with Peacocks by Donna Andrews

           My love of mysteries strikes again!  This series stars Meg, a blacksmith with quite an interesting family.  Each book has a different bird in the title and the birds sometimes become a strong part of the story.  Meg is always the one to lead the story along.  In Murder with Peacocks Meg starts her detecting adventures.      

                Meg has returned home to take part in the weddings of her best friend, brother, and mother.  Take part would actually be quite an understatement.  Completely organizing and running the weddings would be more accurate.  Each of the three brides, including her future sister-in-law, call Meg with new demands constantly.  Finding a non-wedding moment is hard for Meg to do.  While the weddings are not crazy enough, the sister-in-law of her mother’s fiancée is found dead.  This woman was not a pleasant person, and alienated people in the few days between introduction and death.  The suspect list is not exactly small.

                On top of the wedding duties, Meg takes on the task of figuring out who killed the sister-in-law.  Oh, and someone is trying to kill Meg’s mystery loving doctor father as well.  As you can see, Meg’s plate is a tad full.

                Thankfully Meg does not need to do everything alone.  In comes Michael, the “gay” son of the local dress shop owner.  They meet when she comes in for one of the weddings and he soon begins to appear at Meg’s side at all times of the day.  With his help, but mostly through her own deductions, Meg figures out what is really going on.

                There are a lot of characters in this book.  I mean character in the sense of interesting and amount of people.  So many people were mentioned I sometimes had a hard time keeping them straight!  I do not like how everyone takes advantage of Meg, but the mystery is good and I am glad I kept going with the series.