FREE: Spider Web by Earlene Fowler

The listing, Spider Web by Earlene Fowler has ended.

Benni Harper, curator of San Celina's folk art museum, is busy coordinating the first ever Memory Festival, a celebration of memories of loved ones through quilts, crafts, scrapbooks, photographs, oral history and other tributes. The fair promises to be a wonderful event but is soon overshadowed when a local policeman is wounded, the target of a sniper who has a vendetta against cops.

Benni is concerned for her police-chief husband, Gabe, who may also be a target and is showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder through violent nightmares about his time in Vietnam. As if this isn't enough, a mysterious woman moves to San Celina who shows more than a passing interest in Gabe, leading Benni to wonder if this is yet another woman from his past.

The Benni Harper series is my favorite in the amateur female sleuth genre. Fowler has a way of telling the story that makes the characters seem real and I like how she brings out Benni's faith in God without this being Christian fiction. By that I mean it is simply a natural part of who the character is without being a primary focus of the story.

With the theme of celebrating the memories of loved ones, Fowler did a good job of letting the reader share Benni's feelings as the character remembered when her mother died and writes, "Losing your mother when you are young changes you; the ground beneath your feet is never quite firm enough. You never completely trust happiness again." And in this description as Benni recalls the death of her first husband, Jack: "His death was no longer a painful throb but more of a soft pinch to my heart. Though you never believe it in those first horrific moments of loss, life does keep moving forward."

Spider Web was a good story and kept my interest throughout. I usually have an idea who the culprit is before the end but this time I was kept guessing.