A Minor Case of Murder: A Cassie O'Malley Mystery

Cassie O'Malley #1

by Jeff Markowitz

Rag sheet journalist and amateur sleuth Cassie O'Malley is back in A Minor Case of Murder. When Andy MacTavish brings minor league baseball to White Sands Beach, not everyone welcomes the club. Birders are especially upset by the location of Sand Skeeter Ballpark, but will they resort to murder to protect the birds' nesting areas? When a woman dies at the ballpark, during the final game of the season, Andy asks Cassie for help. Is it murder? Is the dead woman the intended target? Does the dead woman signal the end of the dispute or is this just the beginning of hostilities? Tag along as Cassie and her unusual band of cohorts attempt to untangle the clues in A Minor Case of Murder.

Genres: Mystery

264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2006

About the author

Jeff Markowitz (www.jeffmarkowitz.com) is the author of 6 mysteries, including the award-winning dark comedy, Death and White Diamonds. His new book, The Other, a dual-timeline historical, will be released November 5, 2024. Jeff spent more than 40 years creating community-based programs and services for children with autism, before retiring in 2018 to devote more time to writing. Jeff is Past President of the NY chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

Reviews

[Mathew Walls · Rating 1 out of 5]

If there are four things that Jeff Markowitz loves, they're adjectives, lists, Jameson Irish whiskey, and sex. In that order. This book is so bad. When I started reading, my Kindle app informed me that the book would take about two hours to finish. An hour later I was 10% of the way through it, because I couldn't stop highlighting examples of terrible writing. To save you the bother of finding them for yourself, here are some examples from that first 10% (emphasis mine):

He was a good-looking gentleman in his thirties, handsome in a way no longer fashionable, not health-club handsome, not rock-star handsome, but Eisenhower-era handsome, Pillsbury-doughboy handsome, his hair cut by a barber rather than a stylist, his suit purchased at a discount warehouse.

Personally I prefer my men Michelin Man handsome.

Madame Alexina, with her bright red bouffant hair and slight orange moustache, dressed in lime green polyester bowling shirt and pink capri pants,

With yellow shoes and a blue hat?

Her unfinished collection of Zen limericks (“There was a Bodhisattva Kannon/Who was known for the men that she’d blown/With her eleven heads perched in ten different beds/She still had a mouth left to moan”).

Someone actually wrote this and then didn't immediately delete it in embarrassment.

Madame Alexina began to tease the bowling ball, tracing little circles around the finger holes. The shell was becoming steadily more translucent, the interior less dark, more liquid. Hesitantly, Madame Alexina slid her fingertips ever so slightly into the holes and, emboldened by the lack of resistance, began to probe ever more deeply and vigorously. ... As Madame Alexina’s pace quickened and her fingers grew more confident, the inky depths grew ever weaker, until, in a moment, the bowling ball surrendered itself—transparent, exposed, and vulnerable.

Yep, she just fucked a bowling ball.

Still, as the daughter of a developer, herself a part-owner of Harbrough and Daughters, the conventional wisdom was that Doah would never elect a developer as mayor.

Just try to parse that sentence.

Mr. Caputo was fiercely neutral, took great pride in the fierceness of his neutrality,

If I don't make it, tell my wife "hello".

On Tuesday, Cassie searched the Web, intending to look for links to psychic phenomena in New Jersey, but she found herself Googling Andy MacTavish instead. A page of links popped up on her computer screen, but the idea of reading up on Andy made her feel like a Peeping Tom. Without opening any of the links, Cassie exited the screen, reverting to her psychic search. She was directed to hundreds of thousands of hits and sampled a few, reading about levitation, ghosts, astral projection, psychic pets, prophecies, magic, mythology and secret societies. There was no way for Cassie to systematically sample the sites. She scrolled through page after page of search results, bypassing hundreds of links, waiting for…what?

Do you get the impression that Jeff Markowitz doesn't use the internet much?

Oh, and the thing about Jameson Irish whiskey? Variants on the phrase "poured herself a Jameson" appear seven times in the book, and there are a few other examples where he phrased it a bit differently. And this is not a long book. He really wanted us to know that Cassie loves Jameson. I guess his friends know what to buy him for his birthday.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful reading 📚

A very will written romantic thriller mystery in the Cassie O'MALLEY Mystery Series. The characters are interesting. The story line is fast moving and complicated with lots of twist and turns leading to the unexpected conclusion. I would recommend this novel to anyone looking for a new author. Enjoy reading 🔰2021 😊

[Ellen White · Rating 4 out of 5]

The attempted murder of a baseball mascot, in this small town. The birdwatchers and the nesting birds at the ball field, which is going to win. The zany antics give you plenty of laughs.
Given audio for my voluntary review and my honest opinion

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

OMG...who edited this? I can forgive on an advanced copy but this one wasn't. If I were the author, I wouldn't have signed the copy.

[Uncious · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with the previous installment of this growing Cassie O'Mally series, "Who's Killing Doah's Deer," Mr. Markowitz returns with the zany craziness that is an inter-connected small town and surrounding communities. Mysteries aren't supposed to be funny, but just watch how many rules rise up as expectations in your head and laugh along each crisply constructed page for the crimes to be perpetrated and Cassie to ferret out the truth. the truth is that some rules are meant to be broken and this is a delightful surprise.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, about the attempted murder of a New Jersey minor league baseball team's mascot, manages to cram a very strange cast of characters including a psychic, an emotionally damaged Desert Storm war veteran, a arsonist bird watcher and a writer for a sleazy magazine into its 264 pages. Its worth reading if only for that.

[Littlegolynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the way this book ties in with the first.