Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma

by C.J. Verburg

400 years after the "First Thanksgiving," a business lunch for leaders of GreenHome LLC and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe leads to murder. Or does it? Stopping at a yard sale on their way to Leo's Back End, property developer Harriet Benbow beat out two of her fellow guests in a squabble over an antique toastrack. The next morning she's found dead. Payback? A burglary gone wrong? A violent protest against GreenHome's plan to build luxury condos on an indigenous burial ground?

Detective Pete Altman wonders: What kind of burglar would cut up the victim's scalp? Back End soup-chef Lydia Vivaldi and Wampanoag pastry chef Mudge Miles wonder: Is somebody trying to frame the Indians? Reclusive artist-author Edgar Rowdey, who'd rather be plotting his own mystery for Golden Age Magazine, wonders: Where does the toastrack fit in?

In this picturesque seaside village, solving a crime takes collaboration. Quansett is too diverse for everyone to like each other -- natives and wash-ashores, fishermen and artists, Irish, Brazilian, English, Cape Verdean, Wampanoag, African-Americans -- but it's so small that they all have to get along. This brutal attack threatens to shatter their community. Lydia hopes it won't also sink her catering start-up with Mudge. With the grapevine buzzing, and the police slogging through mismatched clues, suspects, lies, and betrayals, she's afraid not even the Back End's amateur sleuths can solve this tangle in time to stop the killer.

186 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 25, 2021

About the author

San Francisco writer Carol (CJ) Verburg is an award-winning playwright, theater director, and author of best-selling books, including the international literature collections Ourselves Among Others and Making Contact.

Carol started her literary career before age one, telling stories to a rapt audience of stuffed animals. In her early teens she wrote her first novel and won her first playwriting award. At Mount Holyoke College she wrote the book and lyrics for the first rock musical, We Could Save the World. Since then she's worked as a cocktail waitress, newspaper proofreader, part-time boat-builder, and (for decades) an in-house and freelance trade and textbook editor and author in Boston and San Francisco.

Her Cory Goodwin mystery series includes Silent Night Violent Night, an hommage to the noir side of publishing, and Another Number for the Road, the first multimedia literary rock-&-roll novel.

For many years she ran theater companies on Cape Cod and lived up the road from the artist and author Edward Gorey. They became close friends and frequent collaborators, a symbiosis which inspired her lavishly illustrated 2024 artist's biography The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey: Rare Drawings, Scripts, and Stories, as well as her short multimedia ebook Edward Gorey On Stage, and her Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod mystery series: Croaked, Zapped, and Shafted, or The Toastrack Enigma (plus a couple of stories).

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

We’re back on Cape Cod, this time with a murder that might be related to the clash between property developers and the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. As in the other two Edgar Rowdey books, Edgar is neither the detective nor the main character, and this time the police are more involved in solving the crime, but the “toastrack enigma” is an Edgar whimsey that turns out to be crucial. When he first brings the toastrack to the diner, having found it at a yard sale, Lydia knows what it is: “‘They’re big in England,’ said Lydia. ‘Your toast goes in the slots, and they carry it to your table by the pointy handle. To make sure your toast will be stone cold when you butter it.’” Exactly. The plot moves right along while also raising awareness about Indians in 21st-century New England and how the reality usually differs from the stereotypes.