One Bad Apple by Sheila Connolly Narrator Robin Miles

One Bad Apple: An Orchard Mystery
Series: Orchard, Book 1
By Sheila Connolly
Narrated By Robin Miles
Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
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Author Sheila Connolly

Narrator Robin Miles

Robin Miles is an extremely talented narrator. I loved listening to her read the Orchard Series. She's versatile and expressive. I really did not like many of the women in the Orchard Series, and Ms.Miles' narration was able to amplify to excruciating levels just how annoying these testy, self centered, whining women are. Truth is I did not like Maura Donovan in Sheila Connolly's other series The County Cork Mysteries. Nonetheless the books are all very good. I especially enjoyed the first five of the Orchard books. 

One Bad Apple: An Orchard Mystery
Series: Book Review

One Bad Apple, is the first in the series. Meg Corey has been downsized and ousted from her job as a commercial loan clerk, her boyfriend  recently broke up with her. Megs' mother suggests that she could go to Granford, Massachusetts and get a house ready to sell. Meg, agrees with her mother that getting away from Boston would be a good thing and without seeing the house Meg agrees to use her severance money for any repairs and so forth that the house might need and she'll regain her investment from the proceeds of the sale. 

What Meg couldn't have foreseen is just what bad shape this rambling old colonial house is in. Her mother inherited it twenty years ago and let an attorney handle it. So for twenty years it was rented out while she just banked her rental income giving the house no more thought. It's cold, drafty, and sorely in need of a new, well, just about everything. During her first week there the septic system needs replacing. Her Realtor hooks her up with Seth Chapin, plummer extraordinaire. Seth digs up her sewer pipes and septic system to find that age has taken its toll and it all needs replacing. 

That evening Megs' ex-boyfriend shows up at her door, he's as surprised to see her as she is to see him. Unknown to Meg is he is in town to do a strip mall contract that he's trying to push the city and some property owners to agree to. They go to dinner that night and between the time they have dinner and the next day he is found blocking up her still unfilled sewer and quite dead. Meg is a prime suspect.

Meg is another one of Sheila Connolly's protagonist that is not very likable. I never did warm up to her but she is not as bad as Maura in the County Cork Mystery Series, that distinction will go to a yet to arrive in a later book as Meg's orchard manager. Again although I did not ever care much for the miserable Meg, I do enjoy the Apple Orchard Series.