24For the first time in decades, Lucy Stone has nobody to cook for on Thanksgiving. Elizabeth is working at a hotel in Paris, Toby has taken his family back to Alaska, Sara has signed up for a field trip to Greenland, and Zoe, the youngest, has accepted an invitation to Montreal. So Lucy is doing something new with the holiday. She is training, seriously, for the town’s Thanksgiving-morning 5K, because the women’s over-forty field is thin and she thinks she can win it. Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier opens on one of those training runs, with the family Lab beside her, and builds toward the starting gun. What falls between is the usual Tinker’s Cove mix of deadlines, gossip and corpses, with an unusually sharp edge.
Where Turkey Trot Murder Sits in the Lucy Stone Series
This is the twenty-fourth Lucy Stone novel, published by Kensington in autumn 2017, and the second built around Thanksgiving after Turkey Day Murder in 2000. Lucy is still a part-time reporter at the Pennysaver, the struggling weekly owned by her editor Ted, still married to Bill, a restoration carpenter, and still breakfasting every week at Jake’s with Sue, Pam and Rachel. The children are grown and scattered, which is the quiet subject underneath this one.
The full reading order, none of which we have reviewed yet, runs Mistletoe Murder (first published in 1991 as Mail-Order Murder), Tippy Toe Murder, Trick or Treat Murder, Back to School Murder, Valentine Murder, Christmas Cookie Murder, then Turkey Day Murder and Wedding Day Murder; after those come Birthday Party Murder, Father’s Day Murder, Star Spangled Murder, New Year’s Eve Murder and Bake Sale Murder, followed by St. Patrick’s Day Murder, Mother’s Day Murder, Wicked Witch Murder, English Tea Murder and Chocolate Covered Murder. The later run is Easter Bunny Murder, Christmas Carol Murder, French Pastry Murder, Candy Corn Murder and British Manor Murder, with this book at number twenty-four and Silver Anniversary Murder next. Several holiday novellas sit alongside, published in shared anthologies.
What Turkey Trot Murder Adds
The dead woman Lucy spots in the reeds of a frozen pond is Alison Franklin, a twenty-year-old college runner and the daughter of Ed Franklin, a retired CEO who has built the biggest house on Shore Road and talked his way onto the board of health. The town assumes drugs. Lucy, who saw the running shoes and the headband, is not so sure, and before long the Franklin family has a second death on its hands.
What Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier adds to the series is a political temperature. Franklin arrives at the Pennysaver office demanding a crusade against Mexican drug traffickers, then turns his ire on Rey Rodriguez, a celebrity chef converting the old Irish pub into a fusion restaurant, telling him he will need paper plates because the septic system cannot handle a dishwasher. Rey and his son Matt, whose family has been in California since the 1500s, file a complaint. The town has to decide who it is.
What works
- The selectmen’s meeting is the best scene in the book. After Franklin compares newcomers to mice, the shy newest board member unfolds a church bulletin and reads Niemöller’s lines about speaking out into the minutes. It is small-town democracy at its most quietly brave.
- Lucy’s reporting has bite. A local trash hauler insists he serves everyone, then admits his receptionist turned the Rodriguezes away after Franklin made threats, and promises to fix it before the story runs.
- The addiction thread is handled with real compassion. Lucy stakes out a drug-dealing parking lot and finds Hank, a boy her daughter once dated, rolling up his sleeve. The scene where he explains that rehab wants ten thousand dollars up front is the emotional centre of the book, and the opioid epidemic it sketches feels lived rather than researched.
- The office comedy stays light. Phyllis’s seasonal wardrobe, from apples and pumpkins to a sequined turkey, deserves its own column.
Where It Gives Ground
- The solution comes by hunch. Lucy cracks the case mid-race through a sudden memory, not by assembling clues, and much of the explanation is reported afterwards rather than shown.
- The culprit is easy to spot. One suspect is signposted so heavily from the middle chapters that seasoned cozy readers will finish ahead of Lucy.
- The middle drifts. Errands, phone calls and a pizza night fill pages that could have tightened the investigation in Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier.
- Some characters speak in editorials. The arguments about race and immigration are sincere, but several speeches read as positions rather than people, and a handful of typos survived editing.
Do You Need the Earlier Books?
No. Meier reintroduces the household, the newsroom and the breakfast club in a line or two each, and the mystery is self-contained. Long-time readers get the extra pleasure of watching Lucy cope with the empty nest the earlier books spent years filling, but a newcomer can start with Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier and lose nothing.
Read These Next
If Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier leaves you wanting more small-town sleuthing, start here.
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke, for another long-running small-town series with a working woman at its centre.
- The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, for amateur sleuths and a community that talks over every development.
- The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose, if you want to roll straight on into the next holiday.
- It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder by Ally Carter, for a festive whodunit with more romance in the mix.
- Turkey Day Murder by Leslie Meier, the series’ first Thanksgiving case, for a younger Lucy with a full house.
About Leslie Meier
Leslie Meier was born in the Bronx in 1948 and spent much of the 1990s reporting for local papers on Cape Cod, covering the kind of zoning boards and selectmen’s meetings Lucy sits through in Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier. The resemblance between author and heroine is deliberate: both came to newspaper work after years of raising children.
- Her debut, Mail-Order Murder, came out from Viking in 1991 and was later reissued as Mistletoe Murder.
- Kensington has published the series since Trick or Treat Murder in 1996.
- Almost every title is pinned to a holiday or a family milestone, from Valentine’s Day to a wedding.
- She also writes holiday novellas for shared collections, including Eggnog Murder (2016) with Lee Hollis and Barbara Ross.
Worth Your Shelf
As a puzzle, this is one of the softer entries in a long series: the killer is visible early and the solving relies on luck. As a portrait of a small town at Thanksgiving, deciding whether to close ranks or open its doors, it is warmer and braver than the cozy label suggests. Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier belongs on a holiday reading pile next to the pie recipes.
Lace up early, and keep an eye on the course markers.
