Death of an Obnoxious Tourist

Praise for Death of an Obnoxious Tourist:

"A clever, witty mystery with lots of humor"
--Aaron Elkins, Edgar-winning author and creator of Gideon Oliver, the skeleton detective.

"The book lives up to the promise of the title. . . . Florence is vividly portrayed. I feel as if I've been there . . ."
-- Cynthia Riggs, Author of the Martha's Vineyard Mysteries staring 92-year-old Victoria Trumbull.

"You don't have to be an inveterate traveler to enjoy reading this book."
-- Theodore Feit, reviewer.

"A nicely written traditional mystery."
-- JoAnn Vicarel, Library Journal, May 1, 2006.

"Maria Hudgins writes a delightful amateur sleuth tale and armchair detectives will enjoy seeing Italy through Dotsy's eyes."
-- Harriet Klausner, reviewer.

ISBN 10: 1-59414-467-2
ISBN 13: 978-1594144677
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Dotsy Lamb, history professor and recently divorced empty nester, and her friend Lettie, are on a group tour of Italy when a singularly obnoxious woman, traveling with her two younger sisters, is murdered in her Florence hotel room.

Dotsy enlists the aid of the scatty but observant Lettie, and hooks up with Marco Quattrocchi, the attractive carabinieri captain in charge of the investigation. The killer might have been a member of their tour group, or a Gypsy camped nearby, or one of four people Dotsy had met since her arrival. There are motives galore. The murdered tourist has insulted practically everyone in the tour group, her two sisters are left with a nice inheritance, and she may have had a drug connection to the fiance of the tour guide. Then, while visiting the Piazzale Michelangelo, a member of the tour group falls over a balustrade. It appears to be an accident, but Dotsy believes it's another murder, and she sets out to prove it. Because, if she doesn't find the missing threads to a complex tapestry of deceit and corruption, the next dead tourist's body could be her own.

Excerpt:

Chapter One

“Strip search?” Lettie slapped a cold, quivering hand on my arm. “Please, Dotsy, talk to them. This can’t be happening!”

“I can’t believe you had a gun in your carry-on, Lettie. Have you lost your mind?” Here we were in Milan, Italy. A whole new world. Same old Lettie.

“I was just following your suggestion, and it isn’t a gun. It’s a water pistol.”

I threw a maternal arm around Lettie’s trembling shoulders. At home, Lettie and I live two hundred miles apart, and we normally get together maybe once or twice a year. It amazes me that she manages to stay alive and out of jail without my constant intervention.

“I told you to bring a water pistol to Italy? Maybe you misunderstood me. I may have said to bring a water bottle.”

“No, and don’t treat me like a kid. I’m fifty-umm years old.” Lettie shuffled at a snail’s pace toward the door the uniformed security man had indicated. He scrutinized her from his position behind a checkpoint table. Lettie eyed him as if she might try to make a break for the concourse and hide out in the duty-free shop.

Dragging her suitcase behind her like an albatross dead three days, she trudged through the doorway and disappeared behind a humorless-looking woman who shut the door with an ominous click. Welcome to Italy.

I wasn’t about to let this ruin my day, let alone my trip. I could already see myself laughing about it at Christmas parties next winter. I slipped out my passport and ran my finger lovingly over the brand new stamp. My first passport stamp. My first passport.

“Dorothy Lamb?” I jumped at the sound of my legal name and located the source, a pretty young woman with tousled auburn hair shoved back with a pair of large sunglasses. “I’m Tessa D’Angelo, your tour guide. Welcome to Milano.”

“Please call me Dotsy.”

“And this is Amy Bauer,” Tessa said, turning to her companion.

Just behind Tessa, a tall woman who could easily have been a model—she was gorgeous—stepped forward and extended her hand toward me. The extending of the hand, I think, caused her purse to slip off her shoulder and bounce into the crook of her arm. A slip of paper popped out of the purse and drifted, perhaps caught by a tiny air current, toward me. As it landed near my left foot, I bent over to pick it up for her.

Amy Bauer lunged forward so fast and so awkwardly—it would be no exaggeration to say she pounced on it—that she fell, head first, onto the top of my lowered head. The inside of my eyes were immediately treated to a psychedelic light show. I heard a crack which could have been either Amy’s barrette or my own skull, and my sinus cavities imploded, as if I had just dived off the high board and hit the water, chin first. I grasped the paper, but Amy snatched it away before I could even yell, “Owww!”

She apologized profusely, and I, in an attempt to get this relationship off on a smoother footing, changed the subject. “You must be Beth Bauer’s sister. Lettie is dying to meet you. She says the last time she saw you, you were about six.”

“If she says so, I’ll take her word for it. Beth has told me so much about her old friend—oh, I didn’t mean . . .”

“That’s okay. I know you meant old in the good sense of the word,” I said. What the hell is the good sense of the word “old”? I wondered. If Lettie was old to Amy, what must I seem like to her? I’m five years older than Lettie.

“Is that Letitia Osgood you’re talking about? Where is she?” Tessa scanned the printed list she held clamped to a clipboard.

“Well, at the moment, she’s being strip-searched. She ran into a spot of trouble at the immigration gate.” I explained the whole thing while Amy’s and Tessa’s mouths dropped closer and closer to their collarbones.

“Why didn’t she get caught in Washington?” Tessa asked. “Security should have caught that before she got on the plane.”

I shrugged as the door swung open and Lettie, now pushing her luggage ahead of her, sort of oozed out with her head down, as if she thought everyone in the airport had just seen her naked.

“I hate Italy. I want to go home.” Lettie’s chin tightened up in that way it always did when she felt vulnerable.

Tessa whisked us out of the airport so quickly, Lettie had no further chance to dwell on her recent unpleasantness. A blast of heat hit us as we dashed out and through a parking area to the six-passenger SUV Tessa had borrowed from her tour company. She heaved our luggage into the back. “We have to pop over to Linate Airport on the way out of town. There’s a couple coming in on a ten o’clock from England to join us, and that, I believe, will be everybody. The others are already at the hotel in Venice.”

Lettie and I hopped in behind Tessa and Amy. “I’m at a total loss to think what I said that made you bring that water pistol, Lettie,” I said.

“You said, ‘it’s fun to meet children when you travel, and one way is to have a toy to show or give them.’”

“I meant something like a balloon or a finger puppet.”