“Mum’s the Word” by Kate Collins

I have the post-blizzard blues. The days are short. It’s very cloudy. Snow is piled high. When I took art classes, my instructor called me the ‘color person’ of the class. I love color and I used it in my drawings and paintings. So looking out the window to see white all around does not make me happy.

Instead of reading a holiday-themed book like I planned to do, I thought I’d switch gears and re-read the first book in the Flower Shop mystery series written by Kate Collins. The book is set in the hot summer and the female-sleuth, Abby Knight, owns a flower shop. A perfect escape for this time of year!

When I started this blog, I reading book three in the series “Dearly Depotted”. One of my goals in life is to be organized, so I thought I’d re-read and blog about book one in the series. It’s called “Mum’s the Word”.

We use ‘mum’ from time to time to indicate silence. In this case, it’s the police who are ‘keeping mum’ when it comes to answering Abby’s questions about the man in the black SUV who hit her car and drove off. There was a murder the same day, at about the same time that Abby’s car got hit, and she thinks there is a tie-in between the two events.

One thing Abby can’t keep ‘mum’ about is injustice. Mostly because her father was on the police force. Her co-worker Lottie has a cousin named Pearl who is being abused by her husband. Lottie asks Abby to provide Pearl with some legal advice, even though Abby flunked out of law school. Abby obliges and encourages Pearl to leave her husband. Then Abby starts having run-ins with Pearl’s nasty and abusive husband. No ‘mum’s the word’ for Abby!



(photo courtesy Stock.xchng)