A Little Night Murder by Nancy Martin is the 10th book in the “Blackbird Sisters” mystery series. Publisher: Obsidian, August 2014

Murder under the stars….
Nora Blackbird—pregnant at last!—is spending summer afternoons wallowing in the Bucks County pool of her best friend, Lexie Paine, who has just been released from prison. At night, Nora is covering Philadelphia’s high-society events for the local newspaper. And this time she doesn’t have to look far for a good story.

Next door, a Broadway show is in rehearsal at the estate of Toodles Tuttle, the long-deceased but ever-legendary composer. Reigning over the estate is Toodles’s diva widow, Boom Boom. The demanding old broad still rules with an iron fist, and considering the chorus line of enemies she’s racked up over the years, her death has been a hotly anticipated event. So imagine everyone’s dismay when it’s her beloved daughter, Jenny, who drops dead—from a cause that is anything but natural—just as the lights are set to go on for the lucrative new Toodles musical.

Yet murder is only an overture to the drama to come….
Nora’s sister Libby, a soon-to-be-grandmother, has gotten herself into a sticky situation, wooed by both a lowly bug exterminator and a cheesecake-loving Broadway impresario. Edgy sister Emma has a dangerous new boyfriend who may jeopardize her show-jumping exploits. And the love of Nora’s life, Mick Abruzzo, has been desperate to prevent Nora from meeting the most notorious member of his mobbed-up family—his mother.

Now Nora has to deal with the bump-and-grind of her personal life, and also bring the curtain down on a daring killer—before he forces her to exit stage left, permanently.

I love it. Nancy has done it again by delivering a wonderfully crafted novel that I devoured from beginning to end. The mystery kept me interested as there were plenty of suspects to ferret but it was everything else that surrounded Nora and her pending motherhood that engaged and entertained me. The author did a great job in creating an atmosphere that made me feel that I was part of the drama unfolding within the pages of this delightfully friendly story. There were some surprises in store for Nora in this tome, but the biggest surprising twist came at the end and wow, that I never saw coming. The Blackbird sisters are back and doing what comes naturally to them; Mick is Mick and with Lexie back in the game and Bridget arriving on their doorstep, I can’t wait for the next book in this fantastically delightful series.