Maggie Sefton – Cast on, kill off

The tenth book in the Knitting Mystery series, published June 5, 2012. But I have to wait a whole year for the paperback version.
Genre: cozy mystery
Cover: lovely.



Wedding bells are ringing in Fort Connor, Colorado, and the House of Lambspun knitters are abuzz with excitement. But when a murder interrupts the wedding planning, Kelly Flynn will have to solve this crime fast to ensure the killer doesn't wind up on the guest list...
Kelly Flynn's knitting pal, Megan, is about to get hitched, and Megan has found the perfect seamstress, Zoe Yeager, to create the bridesmaid dresses. But Zoe is harboring a secret. Bruises on her face show a troubling side of her marriage, and just after she finds the courage to leave her husband, she’s shot dead.
Zoe’s husband is a key suspect, but there are others who might have had designs on her death. It's up to Kelly and her knitting pals to use their sleuthing savvy to solve the case. They'll have to stitch up all the loose ends before they can don their dresses and escort Megan into the land of happily ever after...


Reading the new book in this series, is just like visiting with friends. I was not lost for a moment, and it was like I finished the previous book last week instead of a year ago. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Earlier, Kelly and her boyfriend broke up, and now they are slowly finding their way back to each other. They met unexpectedly over business in Denver, and started going out to dinner together. Kelly’s friends keep urging her on, telling how they are meant to be a couple, but I love how careful she is now, how she takes her time to be sure she can trust him again, that he won’t turn into the jerk who broke her heart last time. So yes, they do come back together at the end of the book, and I was happy with that. It all flowed naturally, and believable.

But this is a mystery as well, and a good one, but I have to admit, I guessed the truth very early on.
Zoe Yeager is the seamstress chosen by Megan to design her wedding dress, and the bridesmaids’ dresses. All lovely bold colors instead of the usual pastel ones and Kelly really loves her dress. But when fitting the dress, she notices the ugly bruise on Zoe’s face. Later Mimi tells her, that Zoe’s husband regularly hits her, and she has been trying to get Zoe to leave him for a long time now.
The next day, Zoe comes running into the House of Lambspun, Mimi’s shop for all things fiber related, where Kelly regularly comes to knit or to do her accounting work on her lap top. Zoe is totally stressed out, and it appears that she finally did leave her husband after he forcefully forbade her to go on a trip to New York she won with one of her wedding dress designs. Mimi is very happy, and immediately mobilizes whomever she needs to get Zoe to the secret location of the women’s shelter in town.

Still, Kelly is not so sure that Zoe is a nice person, having witnessed the way she treats her older sister Vera. And now there is this other seamstress, Leann, who accuses her of stealing her dress design to win the contest. Zoe used to work for Leann before she opened her own shop, taking a lot of Leann’s customers with her.

And then Zoe gets murdered in the church parking lot, while she should not even have been there alone. She is supposed to be accompanied by one of the shelter volunteers at all times, to protect her from her abusive husband. Ofcourse everyone thinks the husband did it, especially as he was drunk without an alibi, but soon the evidence begins pointing at Leann. Mimi is in tears, as Zoe, Vera and Leann are all friends of hers, and she asks Kelly to look into things. She is so good in sleuthing and just asking questions of people to get to the truth.

Of course Kelly agrees, and with Burt’s help, she begins to unravel the case, thread by thread. She doesn’t believe for a minute that Leann is guilty….


A good mystery, a nice amount of catching up with Kelly and all her friends, and I loved the little romance part. If I ever am able to visit America, the Rocky Mountains are on my wishlist, and I will for sure visit Fort Connor and Lambspun. Yes, the shop portrayed in the book is real. The murders are not ;)

And if I have any knitting fans amongst my readers, there is not only a recipe in the back of the book, but also a knitting pattern to the shawl from the bridesmaid dresses.

9 stars.

© 2013 Reviews by Aurian