Rating: 2.5* of five The Book Description: During her years spent in New York City. Faith Fairchild was convinced she had seen pretty much everything. But the transplanted caterer/minister's wife was unprepared for the surprises awaiting her in the sleepy Massachusetts village of Aleford. And she is especially taken aback by the dead body of a pretty young thing she discovers stashed in the church's belfry. The victim, Cindy Shepherd. was well-known locally for her acid tongue and her jilted beaux, which created a lot of bad blood and more than a few possible perpetrators � including her luckless fiance, who had neither an alibi nor a better way to break off the engagement. Faith thinks it's terribly unfair that the police have zeroed in on the hapless boyfriend, and so she sets out to uncover the truth. But digging too deeply into the sordid secrets of a small New England village tends to make the natives nervous. And an overly curious big city lady can become just another small town death statistic in very short order. My Review: BAD First Mystery Novel Syndrome: Introduce characters that Central Casting would find rich and nuanced, but the Experienced Mysterian finds barely three-dimensional.Then kill people that have blindingly obvious connections to each other, and to a cast of interchangeable Cozy Village Populators. Extra points (off) for including ancestor worshiping elders in a New England setting as major plot movers. Throw in a white cop from the Bronx as a detective with a Noo Yawk attitude. Ugh.Describe your sleuth and her family with phrases so stock as to cause the Experienced Mysterian to make a mental police-artist drawing with attendant level of accuracy.Set your story in a small New England stereotype of a town during the fall and have the transplanted New Yorker sleuth comment on the scenery and the weather without the slightest hint of fresh observation or even any believable motivation for her to so much as notice them.Reveal the killer in such a way as to cause maximum snorts of derision and impatient huffing. The killer's identity was, I admit, not a standard choice, and so this first novel got an extra half star.It's the first novel of NINETEEN in the series to date. If my very, very, very favorite porn star slipped into bed next to me, whispered disgusting and salacious suggestions of what he'd like me to do to him, and then said I had to read the second in the series before I was allowed to, I'd read the next one.Otherwise, no. I have Ambien for sleeplessness, and while not as effective as this book in conkin' me out, it hurts less. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Body in the Belfry is the first in a series whose protagonist is Faith Fairchild, a New York-bred caterer who falls in love with a minister and ends up in a small suburban Boston town. In this book, although she has been married long enough to produce a baby, she is still learning her way around the New England mores, as well as how to be a mother and a pastor's wife. When she discovers a dead body in a historic landmark (this belfry is free-standing, not atop a church) it leads to undreamed-of complications, particularly since the dead girl was a parishioner of her husband's. Faith is an engaging character who never quite loses her New York edge, and the other characters in the book are equally the kind who make the reader care what happens to them. Page is very good at showing the effects of murder on a community, even when the victim was a disagreeable character. Highly recommended for those who like traditional but not "cutesy" mysteries.
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This book was disappointing. I had high hopes for it, since I'm always excited to start a mystery series I hadn't tried before. This one is about a minister's wife, Faith, who moves with her husband from NYC to a small New England town. And there, surprise, surprise, she discovers a body in the belfry.I found that I didn't care about Faith, her husband, or any of the other characters. The writing was very slow, and I had to force myself to keep reading it. Supposedly the people in the town were Faith's friends, but she didn't seem to have a connection with any of them, and so therefore, neither did I.I'll have to try to find another series to read...
—Carrie
Katherine Hall Page -- The Body in the Belfry 11/09/11 -- 4/BMystery/1990/St. Martin's Press/258 LP#1 in Faith Fairchild seriesLate 1980's/Aleford, MAFaith Fairchild -- minister's wife, mother, caterer, amateur sleuth1st Lines: Fairth Fairchild, recently of NYC, paused to catch her breath.Comments: Another series I've been meaning to try for years. Was able to find the 1st in the series at the library. Faith is a very likeable character, a born & bred New Yorker, independent -- started her own catering business in her 20's did not expect to fall in love w/ a pastor from a small historic town in Mass. This first book we are introduced to Faith fully enjoying her role as a new mother but w/ intentions to go back into catering when Benjamin is a bit older. Faith takes her 5 month old for a walk in town & stops to have lunch on a bench in the belfry ... only to discover the other bench is occupied by a body -- a dead one. The body is of young woman who was not very well liked and the list of those she wronged is long but would they go as far to murder her. Faith doesn't want to see the wrong person be accused and sets out to discover the culprit.
—Pam
This won the best first novel Agatha for 1990. I read this novel for the monograph, and I am calling it a cozy. I was surprised and pleased at how much I enjoyed it. It was my second reading of it, and I can see why this was a successful series. I have several quibbles, but the chief one was I so completely did not buy (or did not appreciate) the way an affair was handled by a major character. I was actually pretty pissed off about it. There were also some weird transitional issues, but I put that down to her being a new author. Most interesting to me: I've thought for years that Page had a series that featured the protag as a single woman in New York City. NOw I can't wait to verify that, though I think I might have fantasized it. (I couldn't check on this while I was in Canada.) Anyway, if I made it all up, and I think it says something for the power of Page's prose, and my imagination. ;-)
—Katherine Clark
