Maggie Summer has agreed to run an antiques show benfitting a local adoption agency on the grounds of the college where she teaches. But threatening letters and a missing young man, a member of the adoption community make it very clear: someone doesn't want this show to go on!
Planning the antiques show seemed a great way for Maggie Summer to find out more about adoption (something Maggie is seriously considering for herself) and help out a deserving organization. She's called in her antique-dealer friends, including new love Will Brewer, who's agreed to help her get the show set up, and dear friend Gussie, for whom traveling can be difficult, and many of her friends from Somerset Counmty Community College. Everything is going like clockwork. That is, until the agency, and then Maggie herself, begin receiving anonymous letters and calls threatening to sabotage the show. Who could bear a grudge against an adoption agency?
With dealers on their way from out of state. Maggie's hands are tied. Despite further menacing calls and letters, neither Maggie nor the agency want to give in to demands. Tension escalates when an adoptive mother is shot, one of her thirteen children goes missing, and the threats become more specific. Someone doesn't want the show to move forward, and Maggie is determined to find out who. She turns to her antique prints, safe, secure, and familiar, and discovers the clue that helps her solve the mystery.
Shadows at the Spring Show tackles thorny emotional issues of race, heritage and personal identity, as Maggie finds she must reconsider some of her own beliefs.
Excerpt
"You want one of my guys to sleep in the gym?" Al Stivali, head of Somerset College Security, raised an eyebrow. "Those antiques must really be big-ticket items."
"Perception is reality. Tell people there's a building full of antiques and they'll imagine hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of items. And when you multiply the retail value of even a relatively small inventory by thrity-six dealers .."
Al nodded. "Got it."
"I'd planned to ask one of the adoptive fathers connected with the agency to stay overnight," Maggie explained. "But now the sitation is more complicated. The agency has asked the local police to keep an eye on the gym, but that just means they'll drive by once an hur or so. I'd like someone here who knows what to do in case of an emergency."
Al put his pen down. "Maggie, what's the real deal. There's something you're not telling me. What's this 'complicated situation?'"
"The head of the agency has gotten several hate letters in the past couple of months. They were nasty, but weren't threatening. The local cops said there wasn't anything they could do."
"Right. Can't arrest someone for words. Just actions."
"Then last week the agency got another letter This one said they shuld stop the antiques show. It specifically mentioned the dates. And I haven't told anyone yet, Al, but yesterday someone left a threatening message on my home answering machine. The same sort of rehtoric. It mentioned the show."
"You haven't told the police?"
"Not yet"
"You need to do that, Maggie. Did you erase the message?"
"No. I listened to it several times. That's what stopped me from calling anyone. Al, I think I've heard the voice before."
Professional Reviews
Good News: Sleuthing Maggie Summer Back In Action
(Maine Sunday Telegram) Good-hearted Maggie Summers, a 38-year-old print dealer who wants to adopt a child, volunteers to run an antique show to bnefit an adoption agency.
Maggie hopes her work with the agency will speed the adoption she desires. But when an anonymous letter writer threatens to sabotage the show, running the event becomes a dangerous mission.
Thus begins SHADOWS AT THE SPRING SHOW, Lea Wait's fourth novel in her well-received Maggie Summers mystery series.
Deceptively simple on the surface, Shadows at the Spring Show introduces readers to officials and clients in a fictional adoption agency raising money to place waiting children in good homes. Most volunteers are good people working a for a cause in which they believe. But all is not right in the New Jersey agency called Our World Our Childre. When a well-liked aodpitve parent of 11 hard-to-place children is shot (on Mothers' Day, and presumably by one of her kids,) it's clear rhat Maggie has more to worry about than a disgruntled letter writer.
Though Wait's book is clearly a fictional thriller with action that builds to a last-chapter crescendo, I was impressed and fascinated with the author's expertise in the area of trasnracial and trasncultural adoption. It's the specialty of her fictional agency. Wait knows all about home studies, the nail-biting months clients wait while waiting for a referral, the delicate question of a same race versus different race adoption, and problems that can arive when an adoption agency holds single people and couples to different standards when it comes to the placing of children.
I think Wait is to be commended for airing through fiction social issues difficult to discss in real life, such as the fact that some adopted kids arrive with not a little psychological baggage. She also show that a desire to adopt doesn't neceessarily mean one is cut out for parenthood.
She is to be commended for weaving daring social commentary into her thriller. She does it deftly because the overall tone of her novel is light and fast and not at all preachy. SHADOWS soars when dealing with these charged issues, and I definitely recommend Wait's book.
It will appeal to people with varied interests. Antique dealers and collectors will find it interesting. So will print collectors, fans of the gentle mystery. and anyone who wans to glimpse through fiction some less sanguine aspects of adoption.
Library Journal: Shadows at the Spring Show
American history professor and part-time sleuth Maggie Summer organizes an antique show to benefit an adoption agency in Somerset County, New Jersey.
When someone begins threatening her, she voqs to find out why. Clues from prints point to adoption, and mixed race families. A great series. Wait, an antique print dealer, lives in Edgecomb, Maine.
Life After Lovejoy (The New York Times)
Shadows at the Spring Show by Lea Wait is the fourth in a series starring an antiques dealer who specializes in antique prints, another somewhat esoteric but affordable angle of the antique business, or anti-biz, as a modern-speak friend of mine refers to it. Maggie Summer, the dealer who doubles as a professor at a small community college, has become involved in setting up a spring antiques show to benefit a nonprofit organization spcializing in aodption, often cross-racial adoption. Not only does the show give her headaches, which anyone who has ever been backstage at organizaing any benefit will instantly recognize, but someone is trying to terrorize the group into caceling the show. There's just enough about the prints themselves to keep an antiques buff going, although the first-time reader migtht need a guide to the recurring characters, and the outcome is not obvious. Wait rarely tips her hand.
An Internet stripper finds fortune, love and murder in New York City after an encounter with a rare first edition book, which opens doors to many possibilities.
