Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Charlotte Adams is a professional organizer. Nothing is out of place in her closets-but her life's a mess. So she's dumped her cheating ex-fiancŽ, moved back home to Woodbridge, New York, and started making up to-do lists-some of which include solving the occasional murder.

Charlotte's new job has her digging through years of accumulated junk to find some important documents. Instead she finds her client, the meanest teacher in town, dead under a pile of the debris that plagued her. And there's no end to the list of suspects-starting with Charlotte herself.

Rating : - A new series kicks off with a couple of unexpected and entertaining twists
Mary Jane Maffini is a well-establish writer of mysteries in Canadian settings. This book, the first of a new series, and set in a small American town, appears to be her novelistic attempt to escape what is sometimes called "the beaver pile" up here in the Frozen North. On the basis of this outing, I think Ms. Maffini has made a successful transition--and good luck to her!

Ms. Maffini is no Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, but she quite obviously is a competent and professional purveyor of cozy mysteries. She knows her business and she has cobbled together a perfectly acceptable and breezy book. She is also intimately familiar with the conventions of the cozy mystery, so familiar, in fact, that she makes riffs on those conventions and, more importantly, on the expectations of her readers.

"Organize Your Corpses" is the sort of book for which a published spoiler would, for once, be an actual disaster. I shall say no more than that I was surprised by not just one but two of Ms. Maffini's characters. What happens is not so shocking it itself, but so highly uncharacteristic of cozy mysteries that I was caught off guard. I admit that the rabbits that come out of Maffini's authorial hat are not half so astonishing as the one in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," but they'll do--oh, yes, they'll do.

Speaking of riffs on cozy mystery conventions, and since the subject has already come up in an earlier Amazon review, it might be noted that a common convention in American cozies is that the always intrepid heroine has a close-by a female friend who was her best buddy from their schooldays. In a nice riff on the tradition and expectation, just such a character appears in this book--but she and the heroine have had a full-fledged falling out. They can't stand each other. And it is this very mutual loathing that the author cleverly uses to support even hoarier cozy mystery convention: the imbecilic refusal of the heroine to call the cops when she should be doing exactly that.

(I see that at least one reader is agitated by the fact that author Maffini never explains how or why the two former best friends became enemies. The second book of the series is soon to be published. I, for one, hope that this particular mystery becomes a running thread, never to be solved.)

"Organize Your Corpses" is a perfectly satisfactory cozy mystery of the American variety--not a masterpiece, but well-constructed and entertaining. On that basis, I'd normally give it four stars. But owing to the unexpected turns inserted into the stereotyped material, I'll knock that up to five.