Benni is the curator of the local museum. In the midst of putting on a large storytelling event in her community, she stumbles on the body of Nora Cooper, the local librarian and Story Teller.

The victim was a resentful blackmailer, who seems to have dug up the dirty laundry on everybody in town. If the author's goal is to completely confuse the reader as to a possible motive for murder, then she succeeds. None of the stories are interconnected and sometimes it seems to be more of a soap opera than a mystery.

Benni is the newlywed bride of the Chief of Police and step-mother to a son close to her own age. She is also the cousin of a runaway away wife who's had it with her cheating husband and the granddaughter of a Bible quoting, senior citizen ranchwoman who is bickering with her visiting sister. Benni is the head of a household that finds her with three guests in what they see as major life crises. Needless to say, Benni is suffering from an identity crisis. On top of this, the town believes she knows all the intimate details of the murder her husband believes is none of her business.

The many suspects revolve around the tradition of story telling. But I was disappointed that Fowler didn't develop the richness and history of the tradition. Instead, she focuses on petty rivalries occurring between competing storytellers. I would have preferred she reduce the number of murder suspects and focus more on the backgrounds of the storytellers and the role of the story in our everyday lives.

The book's subplot is the age-old conflict between a father and a son. The Chief's beach bum, college dropout son shows up on their doorstep just as the murder investigation gets underway. His appearance distracts the chief from his pursuit of the suspect and throws a wrench in his less than year-old marriage to Benni. Fowler is to be commended for not coming up with a pat resolution to this conflict by the end of the book.

Still, the book moves slowly and has too many threads that go nowhere. Compared to her earlier books, Goose In the Pond definitely falls short.

--Marjri Klipsch