When Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, welcomed Katherine Hall Page to the bookstore, she said that Page’s The Body in the Web is one of the best books she’d read about day-to-day life during a pandemic. The Body of the Web is the bookstore’s Cozy Crimes Pick for June. There are signed copies of the book available to order through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/43xyWMR
Here’s the summary of The Body in the Web.
In the 26th book in the award-winning Faith Fairchild Mysteries series, Katherine Hall Page’s beloved amateur detective is hunkered down with her family during the pandemic when a Zoom-bombing scandal sends the community into a tailspin … and a dead body is discovered.
Faith Fairchild joins the rest of the world in lockdown mode when reality flips in March 2020. As the pandemic spreads, Faith and her family readjust to life together in Aleford, Massachusetts. Her husband, Tom, continues his sermons from Zoom; their children, Ben, who’s in college, and Amy, a high school senior, are doing remote learning at home .
Faith is happy to have her family under the same roof and grateful for her resilient community, friends, and neighbors in Aleford. Town halls remain lively and well-attended, despite residents joining from their living rooms. It is at one of these town halls that scandal breaks out. In the midst of a Zoom meeting, damaging images suddenly flash upon everyone’s screens. Claudia, local art teacher and Faith’s dear friend, is immediately recognized as the woman who has been targeted.
When Claudia is later discovered dead, Faith, with the help of her friends, journeys deep into the dark web to unravel the threads of Claudia’s mysterious history and shocking passing.
Katherine Hall Page is the author of twenty-three previous Faith Fairchild mysteries, the first of which received the Agatha Award for best first mystery. The Body in the Snowdrift was honored with the Agatha Award for best novel of 2006. Page also won an Agatha for her short story “The Would-Be Widower.” The recipient of the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement, she has been nominated for the Edgar, the Mary Higgins Clark, the Maine Literary, and the Macavity Awards. She lives in Massachusetts and Maine with her husband.
If you’re willing to read about the pandemic, Peters is right. This was a fascinating reminder of what we all went through. Enjoy the conversation.