Death of a Butterfly

Margaret Maron

2/24/2004

In Death of a Butterfly, Mrs. Cavatori picked up young Bobby Redmond and said good-bye to his mother, Julie Redmond. Then they went to the circus. Someone was in the apartment across from Julie's watching. A little later Julie's ex-husband left the Cavatori apartment and went down the elevator. Mr. Cavatori followed soon thereafter. After a while more, a young man came up the Julie's apartment, then left in a hurry, going down the stairwell. The spy across the hall noticed the apartment door was left open, so went over to investigate. Julie lay dead on the kitchen floor. The spy fled.

Sigrid Harald's friend, Oscar Naumann, had taken her to visit a butterfly specialist. Somehow Sigrid found herself taking home three caterpillars that would soon make cocoons, hibernate, then emerge as butterflies. These were pets she would be allowed to have in her apartment building. Just as she was wondering what to do with them, she was called to Julie Redmond's murder scene.

As Sigrid digs into the facts, family, and friends of the murdered woman, she discovers many people have motive to want her dead. She appears to have been a gold digger, ruthless, and mean. She didn't treat Bobby well when others weren't around, turning him against his father. Instead of finding a suspect, Sigrid has to cull down the suspects.

Death of a Butterfly is an average murder mystery. I understand the Sigrid Harald series gets quite good, to match Maron's Deborah Knott series. But this is early in the series, the second book, and nothing special. It is amusing when Sigrid finds herself at a birthing when the midwife is late. Maron is already starting to intertwine Sigrid's private life for further books with a complex mystery.

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