Let It Crow! Let It Crow! Let It Crow! by Donna Andrews

Let It Crow! Let It Crow! Let It Crow!
by Donna Andrews

ISBN-13: 9781250893963
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Released: October 10, 2023

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Meg Langslow has been roped into participating in a weaponsmithing competition, a Forged in Fire wannabe organized by a blacksmith friend. Meg originally turned down an invitation to participate, but the night before the filming starts, someone attacks Faulk, her blacksmithing mentor, breaking his arm and eliminating him from the contest before it begins. Meg agrees to step in as his replacement to keep the project from failing. She's not thrilled that the filming will take place during December – Christmas is already a crazy time for her. Since the competition is taking place on Ragnarshjem, the picturesque estate that her friend Ragnar, the retired heavy metal drummer, is turning into a Goth castle, Meg won’t have to spend Christmas alone and gets to bring Michael and her twin sons with her.

So Meg joins the cast, to the dismay of several old-school blacksmiths who think women have no place in the profession anyway. And if the show's producers were hoping for drama, they're in luck. The blacksmithing world is a small one, and some of the contestants arrived already laden with grudges and feuds. What could possibly go wrong?


My Review:
Let It Crow! is a cozy mystery. It's a part of a series but can be read as a standalone. Meg, her husband, and kids were engaging and acted realistically. As a female who has taken a traditional blacksmithing class, I was interested in that aspect of the story and enjoyed it.

Meg passed on clues that she discovered to the detective, mostly things she came upon, observed, or happened to overhear. Since we knew that the murder was done with a hammer stolen from the competition tent and Meg had hidden cameras installed at each station, I kept wondering why they didn't check the footage to see if it showed the thief. They never did. While I strongly suspected whodunit and how, Meg didn't figure out whodunit. The killer assumed she'd figured it out and attacked her. When told she didn't guess, instead of confessing to a lesser crime, the killer confessed every detail of how and why.

There was no sex. There was some bad language. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting novel.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.