The summary from the inside cover blurb says "When Lucie Montgomery attends a Thanksgiving weekend party for friends and neighbors at Hawthorne Castle, an honest-to-goodness castle owned by the Avery family, the last great newspaper dynasty in America and owner of the Washington Tribune, she doesn't expect the festive occasion to end in death.
During the party, Prescott Avery, the ninety-five year old family patriarch, invites Lucie to his fabulous wine cellar, where he offers to pay any price for a cache of two hundred year old Madiera that her great-uncle, a Prohibition bootlegger, discovered hidden in the U. S. Capitol in the 1920s. Lucie knows nothing about the valuable wine, believing her late father, a notorious gambler and spendthrift, probably sold or drank it. By the end of the party, Lucie and her fiance, winemaker Quinn Santori, discover Prescott's body lying in his wine cellar. Is one of the guests a murderer?
As Lucie searches for the lost Madeira, she learns about Prescott's affiliation with the Freemasons. More investigation hints at a mysterious vault supposedly containing documents hidden by the Founding Fathers and a possible tie to William Shakespeare. If Lucie finds the long-lost documents, the explosive revelations could change history. But will she uncover a three-hundred-year-old secret before a determined killer finds her?"
Angels' Share is the best written book in this series. Author Ellen Crosby has become a fantastic writer over the years since she began writing this series. All of the books are good. However, the writing is awkward in some sections of the earlier books. Crosby has finally hit her stride with this new novel.
I was somewhat surprised that most of the pursuit of mystery concerned the secondary plot around lost treasure. The solving of the crime, Prescott Avery's murder, took second place. The lost treasure hunt was exciting though and kept me reading but I wondered why, or rather how, it fit in with the murder. The choice for the title was interesting. The angel's share is the amount of wine that evaporates from a wine barrel between the time it is bottled and the time it is opened.
I learned quite a bit about Madiera wine from the book. As with all of the books in the series, a particular wine is featured and the reader becomes knowledgeable about that wine. I could use a glass of it right now since I just finished my Thanksgiving dinner. With the story beginning on Thanksgiving weekend it has a holiday feel to it. I picked the best book to read this week!
5 out of 5 stars!
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