The Cart Before the Corpse: A Mossy Creek Carriage Driving Mystery [Paperback]

"The Cart Before the Corpse" by Carolyn McSparren, is a murder mystery spin-off of the Mossy Creek Hometown Novels. Mossy Creek Hometown series are books of anthologies by different authors set in Mossy Creek, Georgia. It's a Southern rural hometown that claims "it ain't going nowhere, and don't want to." Populated by colorful local as well as retired out-of-town folk, the characters are all a bit flawed, and truly southern.

McSparren love horses, carriages and mystery, not necessarily in that order and combined all three in "The Cart Before the Corpse." Southern carriage-horse trainer Hiram Lackland, a handsome widower, dies mysteriously after retiring to a farm outside Mossy Creek. His estranged daughter, Merry Abbott, also a horse trainer, arrives to settle his estate. Peggy Caldwell, Hiram's landlord and friend, who happens to be a mystery-novel buff, claims he was murdered.

This fast paced, action-packed mystery is filled with odds and ends of the horse carriage world. If you don't know what that is, you will have a good understanding after reading this. The only thing missing was the fresh scent of horse `apples'. This was the first Mossy Creek story I've read and it covers all you need to know. Even though this is the first of the series, it is complete in itself. This was a good, enjoyable read.

"The Cart Before the Corpse" by Carolyn McSparren is a new spin-off book of the Mossy Creek Hometown series. Having not read those books I was a bit afraid I'd find myself out of my depth before I even have a chance to get started. I was happily mistaken - you don't need to know one single thing about the series this spins off from to pick up the reins and start in on this new series.

I love horses and reading about their handling and various competitions, equipage, grooming, and the like, but I'm not terribly knowledgeable about the proper terms...until now. This book doesn't assume that you come from the world of horse shows, driving and carriages but it also doesn't "talk down" to the reader to explain things. The explanations all fit in very well without breaking the flow of the story and I know a lot more now than I did about it all. For some reason I had a preconceived notion that the book would be in a bit more of a "primitive" setting. It wasn't that way at all - much to my delight - I like a good historical or "primitive" set book, but I generally prefer to not mix those with my mystery/investigative reading.

Merry is a strong female character, if you like your female characters to be simpering "let the guy take the lead and sweep her off her feet and solve her problems" types, this is probably not the book for you. She's not so strong that she doesn't have emotions, break down, cry or freak out, but she handles what must be done first, then falls apart if she feels she needs to. She just wants to do the best she can in the face of her fathers death, to do right by what he was trying to accomplish near the end of his life, to find out who killed him, why he was killed, and somehow figure out what to do now that she can't ever truly reconcile with her father now that she's finally reached the point in life when she's ready to allow him back into her life.

In addition to Merry, the other primary characters are well developed and at points during the novel get to tell things from their point of view. While primarily from Merry's viewpoint, you do occasionally get a glimpse of what others are doing - this can help advance the storyline while keeping Merry out of the loop of the ongoing police investigation and further "fleshing out" who these other characters are when they're away from Merry from their own standpoint. The sections are all clearly marked with who's point of view it's being told from, so there is little to no confusion about the sudden switches in locale and method of thinking about the investigation.

I am definitely looking forward to more books in this new spin-off series.

I really enjoyed the unusual setting of the competitive carriage driving world for this murder mystery. The characters are pretty well drawn and the plot not too transparent. I deducted 1 star because I solved it about 1/2 through the book, but it didn't detract too much from my desire to keep reading. The characters are enjoyable in their own right. I will look forward to more in this series.

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