Bitter Roots

Bitter Roots is the 12th wine country cozy mystery featuring Lucie Montgomery as the owner of Virginia's Montgomery Estate Vineyard. Lucie is an unusual heroine because she is disabled from a mobility impairment. However, it doesn't prevent her from managing her business. 

The story opens with Lucie planning her upcoming wedding. She and her winemaker, Quinn Santori, will be married in a ceremony that overlooks her vineyard. However, with all of her Cab Franc vines dying, the scenery will actually be ugly, brown and rotting vines. Lucie and other nearby vineyard owners had purchased vines three years ago from a local nursery, Landau Garden and Nursery. All of the neighboring vines have rotted too. Lucie and Quinn meet with Landau's representatives, Eve Kerr and Richard Brightman, but Landau refuses to refund their $250,000 investment in the diseased vines. Accusations fly between them and an ugly standoff between the supplier and the growers could escalate into litigation. When Eve Kerr, a stunning blonde who works at the nursery, is found dead a few days later, everyone wonders if someone in the winemaking community went too far. What especially troubles Lucie is why Eve secretly arranged to meet Quinn on the day she was murdered and whether Lucie's soon-to-be husband knows something he's not telling her.

I love that the first sentence has a quote from Julia Child: "Julia Child once said that every woman should have a blowtorch in the kitchen." I have always loved this quote and can even remember which TV episode she said it on. The first page contains narrative that gives the reader the entire background of the series. New readers will have no problem following the story. 

This is Crosby's best novel to date. It is also her most sophisticated plot for the series and she wrote it with alot of suspense. At first, I thought that the mystery to be solved dealt with the diseased vines. The author wrote into the story plenty of dialogue about the biology of diseases that vines can have. I enjoyed learning about this aspect of growing grapes. The mystery that dominates, though, is who murdered Eve Kerr. I was not expecting a murder at the halfway point as the mystery about the vines predominated the first part of the story. It could have been enough to carry the novel. However, it did not seem offputting to have a murder this late in the story. Crosby joined all three elements-the vines, the murder and the wedding-into a spectacular ending. We even get a lesson on dereche storms as one hits Virginia in the book. These storms travel horizontally and must travel a minimum of two hundred fifty miles to be considered a dereche.

5 out of 5 stars.