In America, Civil War re-enactments are a popular form of entertainment, with battles staged over a long weekend. MUSKET BALL MURDER brings us to the middle of this fun. Merry Wrath, who used to be a spy under a different name, has settled in the small town of Who’s There, Iowa. The town is capitalizing on a minor skirmish over the creek, proudly named the Battle of Idiot Creek. And wherever Merry and her troop of earnest young Girl Scouts go, murder follows.

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The Scouts are the funny part, of course; they are eager for grime and gore, dressing in nineteenth-century petticoats while keen to use weapons and help with the sawbones. I was a Girl Guide and we may have had ambitions to do more than the usual camping, but we weren’t let away with too much. These resourceful young ladies (some of whom must know Merry can’t tell them all apart yet) go from toasting marshmallows on the campfire to disguising themselves as boys to fight: “authentic!” is their excuse. Merry would never have brought them camping if she had known that some re-enactor was going to get carried away.

I have not read the previous adventures of this Scout Troop but I’ll certainly be looking for more. The writing is careful and clean, with plenty of attention to detail and perhaps more about the madness of getting into character than we want to know. Merry is an interesting character, retired from a precarious job with the CIA, but still running into people from her past. She tries not to show off her skills but sometimes doesn’t have a choice. If you are in need of a read about strong female sleuths this cosy mystery contains plenty of such ladies of various ages. At this point, Merry has married a local police officer, but in MUSKET BALL MURDER she doesn’t lean on her husband Rex Ferguson, mainly because the body she saw vanishes before she can get a witness. And the battlefield is full of people playing dead or groaning about wounds, so imagine the job she has convincing anyone.

There are now fourteen books in the Merry Wrath series and Leslie Langtry has also released eight books in the Bombay Assassins series and has begun another mystery series called Aloha Lagoon. If they are written as well as MUSKET BALL MURDER, I suggest that a newcomer can start anywhere and enjoy the read.  

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