From Publishers Weekly
Frommer's second mystery (after Murder in C Major) offers an entertaining family-centered murder investigation while examining the importance of quilts as a means of understanding women's history. Amateur sleuth and widow Joan Spencer, manager of the Oliver, Ind., Civic Symphony, helps her group prepare to play for the opening of the city's annual quilt show with her hands full and her heart heavy. The demanding chairman of the quilt show, Mary Sue Ellett, has become even more difficult since the death of her mother, Edna, a woman whom Joan had admired. Mary Sue wants to mount a special showing of Edna's quilts, though her brother and sister are more interested in their mother's missing will, which they fear has cut them from their inheritance in favor of a cousin who had been living with and caring for the deceased. Joan tries to sidestep the family's arguments but must endure listening to one heated discussion while hanging quilts for the show. The next day she finds Mary Sue's dead body under a pile of quilts pulled from the display. Along with her estranged daughter and a cop friend, Joan becomes entangled in the Ellett family squabbles-and helps to spot the killer. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
No sooner has old Edna Ellett, of Oliver, Ind., died of the flu than her relatives gather to squabble over her estate, from the big- ticket items like the house she shared with cousin Kitty Graf to the quilt she left unfinished. Violist Joan Spencer, who knew Edna from her volunteer work at the local senior center, watches from afar as Edna's overbearing daughter, Mary Sue, dutifully described as good- hearted by innocent acquaintances, tries to outmaneuver her smarmy brother, Leon, and her long-suffering sister, Alice, for a line on their mother's vanished will. As Mary Sue is marshaling the forces for the Alcorn County Quilt Show, however, she's unceremoniously killed, and Joan, whose orchestra has been engaged to play for the show, suddenly finds herself thrown together again with her infuriatingly inconstant beau, Lt. Fred Lundquist, to find the killer and the still- missing will. As if the Elletts weren't enough of a handful--Leon even wants to date Joan--she also has to deal with the thief who's been stealing computer chips from campus computers, and the thief (the same one?) who's made off with her daughter Rebecca's bravely individual entry in the quilt show. Despite some nifty last-minute twists that enliven a moribund plot, the substitution of quilting for the musical background of Murder in C Major (1986) is likely to discourage more readers than it attracts. And such indiscriminate traffic in felonies only reminds you that too many quilters spoil the cloth. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Murder in Print, the Best of New Writers, Wilson Library Bulletin
"A persuasive Midwest ambience. Small-town life, big-time emotions, and the practical poetry of quilts."


Book Description
Joan Spencer and the Oliver Civic Symphony are rehearsing “The Unanswered Question” when Joan finds a body.

“If you like quilts, music, and low-key mystery, this one will please.”

—Deadly Pleasures

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Joan Spencer and the Oliver Civic Symphony are rehearsing "The Unanswered Question" when Joan finds a body.