It is summer, but Merry and Kelly’s girl scouts are not taking time off for summer vacation in Map Skills Murder by Leslie Langtry. On a sugar high, the girls dig in Merry Wrath’s front yard and find a buried box with a treasure map in it. That starts the troop on a quest to understand the history of their town of Who’s There, Iowa. They particularly are looking for the treasure supposedly buried by Mehitable Peters, the granddaughter and heir to the founders of the town. Visiting the Who’s There Historical Society, Merry meets Edna Lou Murphy, its president, who gives Merry the diary of Mehitable. At first it seems mundane, but as it continues, Merry notices clear signs of the insanity that eventually took over Mehitable’s life. The last page of the diary, written on Mehitable’s 26th birthday concludes with the single word: wubble.
Years later, Mehitable is murdered with an axe, a case labeled by the authorities of the day as an accident, so Merry and her fiance, Detective Rex Ferguson, decided to investigate the hundred-year-old cold case together. But then Edna’s cousin, Ike, the other member of the Historical Society, gets murdered at the Historical Society, and the cold case turns into a hot case. The two cases seem wrapped up in each other, but though Rex can tell Merry to stay out of his investigation (an order she never succeeds in obeying), he can’t stop her from looking into the case of Mehitable. The fact that Rex’s twin sisters own the home where Mehitable died just makes it all the enticing to Merry. Randi, the eternal optimist, and Ronnie, the forever grump, own the house, where they have their store, Ferguson Taxidermy — Where Your Pet Lives on Forever!, and Edna is determined to get the house in order to turn it into a museum dedicated to the mysterious death of Mehitable. And what about this treasure? The girl scouts are determined to help Merry figure all these questions out.
Map Skills Murder has turned out to be one of the most fun and lighthearted of the mysteries in the Merry Wrath series. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the murder in the past with murder in the present. It was fun to join the girl scouts in their adventures as they help Merry with undercover investigation. They are all blood-thirsty spies in training who are excited at the prospect of murder and violence. I also enjoyed hearing more from the diary as Mehitable slowly degenerates into mental illness. She even had her own pet llama, Tinkles, which has inspired Randi and Ronnie in their strange creation of stuffed animals that pose in bizarre human situations. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to read this book and give it five stars!
