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I've heard they're an acquired taste, Tamar Myers's books. It's probably the silliness that puts some people off. The locale of the Magdalena Portulaca Yoder books is a town named Hernia, for example, which if it existed you'd think the Chamber of Commerce would have changed to Westwood Glen by now. But this is Pennsylvania, with the famed town names of Intercourse, Blue Ball, and Paradise; Tire Hill is to the north of where Hernia should be on the map, and the town of Pocahontas is to the south. And then there are all the shticks-the wails, the clodhoppers, charging extra to allow her inn's guests to do their own maid work-many of which the author makes fun of in her writing, and her people shticks, like her worldly sister, Susannah, and the incompetent, lobsterlike chief of police, Melvin Stoltzfus, who's forever blaming Magdalena for the dead bodies that keep showing up at her PennDutch Inn. In this episode, a Colonel Custard reserves the inn for himself and his staff. He's in town to build an elegant hotel and resort in this Amish-Mennonite area, a sort of Dutch Wonderland for the rich and sophisticated, with widened roads and easy access to the interstate. Magdalena doesn't want the competition, and nearly everyone else in town opposes the plan for one reason or another. Of course, Col. Custard turns up as a corpse. Because her beloved if annoying sister has married Melvin, who is busy running for the state House of Representatives, it's up to Magdalena to nab the culprit. Susannah and her wanton "English" ways had been getting on my nerves by the last book, but now she's no longer living at the PennDutch and constantly underfoot, and the series is growing in other ways, too. Magdalena has acquired a 12-year-old pierced daughter, a fiancé who isn't married, and a prospective mother-in-law. She is mistaken for Bigfoot in the tabloids, and she has to cope with a 25-foot-long pet python. To me, all the silliness is fun. But there's a serious side, too. We meet a backwater principal certain he won't measure up, should his school district become yuppified, and a businesswoman hiding in layer after layer of deceit her efforts to overcome her illiteracy. Intermarriage, both racial and religious, produces vignettes. And should a very well-to-do person flaunt her financial superiority with a flashy red sports car and a very heavy engagement ring (when her sister's diamond has so many inclusions it looks like a dental filling)? Anyway, there's a decent mystery underneath all this, and if you can take lots of silliness (and a bunch of custard recipes that look doable) along with your plot, you might enjoy this book.P.S. Somebody ought to warn K. C. Constantine that Melvin Stoltzfus is apparently about to be elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
Reviewed by Joy Matkowski, January 2003
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