Death in Reel Time: A Family History Mystery by Brynn Bonner

                Lately, all I have wanted to do is read.  In a little over a week I crammed through three books.  Two were done in just over a weekend.  One of those two books was Death in Reel Time, the second book in the Family History Mystery series.  How long exactly it took me to get through this book, I don’t know.  All I know is it did not take me long, but I enjoyed it along the way.              

           Genealogist Sophreena McClure and her business partner Esme Sabatier have had their services given to Olivia Clement, a local woman recovering from cancer, as a gift.  As they are working for free, they are not expected to go to the extents that they would for other clients, but they will be looking into Olivia’s family history and reporting back on what they find.  This is much easier said than done as there is little Olivia knows about even her closest ancestors.  Her father ran out on her mother before she was born.  Her mother barely mentioned him, and her uncle and aunt, despite being her father’s brother and sister-in-law, respectively, hardly said a word about him.  It was as though once Olivia’s father left town, he ceased to exist in everyone’s mind.

                This type of mystery, however, is what Sophreena and Esme are used to.  It is their job to uncover family secrets and see where the trails lead.  What they aren’t used to is solving murders.  That is certainly not in their job description, yet Sophreena finds herself in that position yet again when Olivia’s son-in-law is found dead.  The main suspect is a young filmmaker currently staying in Olivia’s home.  With a rocky past, Tony is an easy person to pin the crime on.  He claims he had nothing to do with the murder, but with only Sophreena willing to listen, it is up to her to prove his innocence.         

                Despite my enjoyment of this book, which is apparent from how fast I read it, there were some things I liked from the first one that were missing this time around.  One of those things was the specifics about how Sophreena and Esme do their genealogy research.  There was a little bit as they did have to do some work to get information for Olivia, but nothing like what they did in the first book.  Maybe that’s because this time they weren’t putting together scrapbooks.  The scrapbooking process had a lot of details to it that needed to be explained so the reader could understand what Sophreena and Esme were doing.  Without that task, much of the genealogy work went away.  The book, however, did include the importance of reading journals.  In order to understand what happened in Olivia’s family, Sophreena and Esme read her aunt’s journals, which led the aunt’s spirit to come and talk to Esme.  The parts where spirits talk to Esme I really like.  They offer so many clues as to what is truly going on.  Not only in the murder mystery, but also the mystery of a person’s family history.  As the series goes on, I really hope the spirit aspect does not disappear.

                Something else I missed was the camaraderie between the group of friends Sophreena and Esme are part of.  They were so close in the last book, but this time they seemed fractured.  There were secrets different members were holding and that kept everyone from acting naturally.  Fortunately, most of the secrets that were being held were understandable, leaving the relationships repairable as a result.  At least I hope that’s the way things go.  The end of the book made it seem that most of the problems in the group were resolved, but you never know.  Something else may arise that causes a rift amongst the members.  The only way to find out if that happens is to read the rest of the books in the series.  Since I liked the first two, that will not be a hard thing for me to do.