Reading: OWL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS - Donna Andrews

Though her name and titles had been on my radar for some time (the titles and covers, especially, are all soooo cool), this was my first shot reading a Meg Langslow mystery by Donna Andrews. Owl Be Home for Christmas is book 26 (whew!) in the series, and the Christmas theme was what drew me in right away. Here we follow Meg as she plays personal assistant to her grandfather, who is hosting a pre-Christmas conference on owls at the Caerphilly Inn - Owl Fest - which, unfortunately, is immediately besieged by a blizzard that socks not inches but feet of snow on the proceedings, making checking out impossible and frustrations run high. So much so, when the conference's resident know-it-all, Dr. Frogmore, drops dead during the end-of-conference dinner, nearly any of the other conference attendees could be guilty because the victim - while alive - had managed somehow to tick off every other owl enthusiast in the place. Working with limited resources with the inn snowed in, Meg and her father (another wannabe detective) put their heads together to solve the crime, particularly before the weather lets up and the killer might have a chance to get away. As previously stated, this highly popular cozy mystery series has been on my radar for years, and while I was glad to finally read an entry in it, at the same time I wonder if I should have started from the beginning instead - or at least with an earlier title. Here, the murder just seems to take place quite a ways into the book, even though you can see early on who the victim will be, and then once the murder does occur it's like the novel happens practically in real time; every, and I mean EVERY detail of the investigation laid out like a crime show on A&E Network. Similarly, while I have always found owls fascinating (a trait I inherited from my mother), here it felt like information overload, to where learning about owls seemed to far out shadow the mystery plot. Add to this what felt like characters that have tread this well-worn path too many times, and as mentioned I just wonder if maybe my introduction to this series would have been better off had I started from book one, instead of so far into the series.  3/5 stars

NOTE: I received a free ARC of this title from NetGalley and the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.