Leslee Stanton Nix—aka “Nixy”—thought moving to small-town Lilyvale, Arkansas, would be about as thrilling as watching paint dry. But keeping up with her retired Aunt Sherry and her troublemaking housemates—collectively known as the Silver Six—has proven to be as exciting as it is exasperating.

To kick off the grand opening of their craft shop, the Handcraft Emporium, Nixy and the Silver Six invite Doralee Gordon to teach a gourd painting class. Doralee’s spirit gets squashed when her ex crashes the class with his new fiancée, but things really get messy when the bride-to-be later turns up dead. Now it’s up to Nixy and the Silver Six to use their melons to find the killer—before someone else gets painted out of the picture…

When I read the first book in this series, I was a bit on the fence about how I felt about it. I loved the idea of using Arkansas as the setting and I was actually quite intrigued about the Silver Six. But something about that book kept me from “loving” it. Whatever it was, seems to have disappeared between book one and this book because I loved book two.

It’s been a few months since Nixy first came to Lilyvale to check in on her aunt and she’s finally settling in. Her new craft shop, the Handcraft Emporium is opening and she couldn’t be busier. Though her ancestor, Sissy, set up a trust fund to cover the upkeep and what not of their family businesses, Nixy is determined to make her budding business a great success.

In book one, I felt there wasn’t enough time given to each of the Silver Six and at times became confused about which one was which. This book attacked that issue with such an ease that I found myself almost immediately putting together who was what. While a lot of “neighbors” and townspeople were introduced in the previous this, this book became more focused on a handful of them. This helped to continue to build the world in which Nixy and the Silver Six live in and it added the necessary bit of quirkiness and small town wholesomeness.

This book’s mystery was handled fairly well and though I suspected the killer initially, the author did a great job with providing other suspects and creating a lot of doubt. Overall, this was a strong book and I found myself highly entertained as the story unfolded. I look forward to the next addition to this series and I can’t wait to see what kind of trouble Nixy and her friends find themselves wrapped up in next.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a review.

All opinions of the book are my own.

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