The very pregnant Sarah Kelling Bittersohn is drawn into a plan by her Cousin Dolph and his wife Mary to hold an auction of their home’s surfeit of items collected by generations of Kellings, both in order to clear out the house to some degree and to raise money for a housing project they would like to start, converting an old warehouse into senior citizens’ social housing. They are aided in this scheme by members of their charity, the Senior Citizens Recycling Center, an organization which sees poor senior citizens collecting cans and other debris and turning their finds into the Center for cash. The SCRC is run largely by volunteers and has also become a useful place to keep Osmond Loveday, once an employee of Cousin Dolph’s family and now superannuated but still dependent, busy. When Sarah and Max realize that there is more going on at the SCRC than meets the eye, and a senior citizen is found dead, apparently the victim of a mugging, the race is on to catch a killer before he strikes again…. The seventh book in the Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn series is quite the treat: it’s got everything from a muck-raking “journalist” who is not above creating a fracas to spice up his stories to a series of artworks made of seaweed, and a pregnant Sarah on top of it all! The Beacon Hill house has come back into the series this time around, which I am happy about because I like that setting, but as ever the real stars of the show are Sarah and her innumerable relatives, all of whom have either endearing or exasperating little quirks; recommended, but best to begin with the first book, “The Family Vault,” to get full value for your money! ( )

drug smuggling with recycling as cover. Sarah Keating

situational-humor, verbal-humor, cozy-mystery, private-investigators, family-dynamics, family

The Kelling clan is up to good with a recycling center scheme to give dignity to down and out seniors by having them go about cleaning up recyclables from the streets and bins and paying them for the work. But then one of the recyclers gets dead in an apparent mugging that is suspicious by location, and when a few grains of narcotic are found in his shopping bag the Boston Kellings use all of their collective skills and imagination to ferret out the truth. Lots of fun!
Andi Arndt is the creative narrator. ( )

Booklist Review: In her seventh Sara Kelling mystery, MacLeod once again employs the eccentricities of the entire Kelling clan to produce a solution to an outlandish murder, although it is actually Sarah's sensible detective-husband who orchestrates the investigation. Adolphus and Mary Kelling, Sarah's elderly, beneficent, and, like all of the Kellings, quite wealthy uncle and aunt, have developed a recycling business that serves as much as a community center as it does a place where impoverished seniors can turn in collected bottles and cans for cash. Their plans for a housing development for these seniors look doomed when charges of murders and heroin smuggling (via recycled pop cans) lead to Adolphus' arrest. Fortunately, the family's combined wiles enable the Kellings to outsmart the greedy villain. MacLeod's delightful characters and expert plotting (she is a master of the artfully placed clue) make for a top-notch mystery. DPD. -- ( )