DEAD DANCING WOMEN: An Emily Kincaid Mystery - Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

From the back of the book: "Most days are all the same here in Leetsville. No better, no worse. It was just another garbage day, fighting off the scavenger crows. Then things got worse----a lot worse.

A severed head tumbled out of my garbage can."

With a co-ed chasing ex-husband and a string of failed mystery novels haunting her, part-time journalist Emily Kincaid is convinced she's destined for tragedy. So it figures that just when Emily finds peace---a cozy cabin nestled in the northern Michigan woods---that severed head would turn up and ruin it all.

Emily soon learns that the victim belonged to the Women of the Moon, a group of old ladies who sing and dance around a bonfire in the woods at night. Someone in town has a serious problem with their earth-praising rituals. Now, one by one, they're turning up dead, and Emily finds herself pulled into a righteous murderer's mad machinations.

By forming an uneasy alliance with the fractious Deputy Dolly, can Emily manage to stop the killings---and somehow devise a happy ending?

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A mystery about a mystery writer trying to write a mystery. Excellent!

Emily has moved to a small town to try and write a mystery, one that will actually be published this time.

Only she finds herself in the middle of one. Women are being killed and the only thing connecting them is that they belong to a group who respect and worship, in their own way, the Earth.

I loved the characters in the book. Emily can make friends with the oddest of characters. There's the reclusive ornery neighbor, Harry, who helps Emily around her place and brings her the occasional possum stew. Harry is my favorite I think.

I know the next books will be just as excellent. I need to see how Emily gets on with her ex-husband who has decided that her little slice of heaven could be just what he needs to work on his book about Chaucer...and moves close by.

The mystery is well done, the characters are fully fleshed out and I want to move to this area of Michigan. All my criteria met.

Five all my criteria met beans....