cover image Photo Snap Shot: A Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery

Photo Snap Shot: A Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery

Joanna Campbell Slan, . . Midnight Ink, $14.95 (323pp) ISBN 978-0-7387-1976-4

In Agatha-finalist Slan's diverting third scrapbooking mystery (after 2009's Cut, Crop & Die ), Kiki Lowenstein's 12-year-old daughter, Anya, a student at St. Louis's fancy Charles and Anne Lindbergh Academy, ventures with another girl into the balcony of the school theater, where they stumble on the dead body of an unpopular teacher, Sissy Gilchrist. Hired on the basis of her family's social standing, Sissy was dating a black man—an act that may have given someone motive for murder. Kiki teams again with her crush, the unfortunately married Det. Chad Detweiler, who investigated her husband's still unsolved murder in the first book in the series, Paper, Scissors, Death (2008). Kiki's job at Time in a Bottle, a scrapbooking store, sometimes distracts from the murder investigation, but the subject of racial prejudice makes this a cut above the usual craft-themed cozy. (May)