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Till the Cows Come Home
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Product Description
But on her twenty-ninth birthday, things start to change. A neighborhood child dies from a strange and threatening illness, a string of mysterious disasters place Stella and her farm in peril, not to mention her friend Abe showing up with a new woman on his arm, creating confusing emotions all around. Electrical outages, flooded barns, and cows running loose in the countryside are bad enough, but when her livestock begins turning up dead, Stella knows someone, or something, is out to get her.
Though doctors quickly announce the discovery of the neighbor child's cause of death, another child dies before they can declare victory over the illness, sending the community into a state of near panic. While trying to solve the mystery behind her own troubles, Stella begins to think she alone might hold the answers to the children's deaths.
Striking out on her own, afraid to trust anyone -- friends, neighbors, or the gorgeous stranger she's fallen for -- Stella must find her enemy before anyone else, including herself, ends up dead.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1597198 in Books
- Published on: 2004-04-01
- Original language: English
- Binding: Hardcover
- 265 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Set in Pennsylvania dairy farm country, newcomer Clemens's absorbing mystery thriller explores the impact of runaway development and loss of agricultural land on farmers such as her engaging heroine, motorcycle-riding, 29-year-old Stella Crown. The story opens with the aftermath of a calving as graphic as any similar scene in James Herriott's All Creatures Great and Small: "I tried to wipe the blood off my face, but my gloves were too messy... I looked down at my boots and they were hidden beneath birth muck and manure." This sets the tone for a series of menacing incidents-a leaking hole in a manure pit, a dead cow, a missing dog, a flooded barn-that spell trouble for Stella and others in her rural community. Worst of all is a mysterious illness afflicting children. The author excels at drawing true-to-life characters, including Howie, Stella's family farmhand of 20 years; Zach, her 14-year-old helper; Carla, the veterinarian who sews up the cow that delivers the calf; and her fellow bikers. An attractive barn painter and an old beau provide some romantic conflict, while a suave developer makes a splendid villain.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
She's smart. She's tough. She's sexy. She's a dairy farmer? However incongruous Stella Crown's occupation may seem in conjunction with her attributes, Clemens makes her not only believable but admirable. Left alone when her parents died, Stella runs the family's Pennsylvania dairy farm with help from her hired hand and second father, Howie. It's a hard life, and Clemens' vivid portrayal of the lot of the small farmer is eye-opening and disturbing. But Stella's troubles go beyond the everyday when it becomes clear that someone is sabotaging her. And, even more seriously, children are falling ill with a strange virus--one young boy is already dead. Stella deals with dead cows, arson, a missing dog, and a sick young farmhand while also attempting to sort out her love life. Alternately a Harley-riding, tough farm girl and a kindhearted, vulnerable woman, Stella makes an endearing heroine in a promising first novel. Jenny McLarin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
first mystery: In the opening pages, there's a messy calf-birthing scene as well as an overflowing manure pit. But Judy Clemens gives us in return an
absolutely original lead character: Stella Crown, who runs her old family farm with the help of a veteran hired hand and an eager young neighbor, fighting off
the developers who want to turn the remaining local dairies into housing estates. Crown takes great pleasure from her 1988 Harley-Davidson Low Rider,
which she rebuilt from a wreck, and from sexual encounters with a hunky, itinerant barn painter she can't really afford to hire. On Crown's 29th birthday, which she'd prefer to forget but which a giant clan of family friends insists on marking, it becomes obvious that something worse than ordinary hard times or bad luck is going on. A mysterious, flulike disease has struck the area, especially its children, and someone is devoting a lot of time to subtly attacking Crown's farm and its inhabitants. Clemens' plotting is solid and unexpected, and all her characters--the desperate farmers, their frustrated families, even the local biker fraternity--come quickly to life. Especially Crown, who confesses that she keeps her hair short
"to show off the cow skull tattooed at the base of my neck" but who so far has resisted suggestions to have "Got milk?" engraved somewhere on her body.
-- Chicago Tribune 4/18/04
Customer Reviews
Mystery fans will find plenty to thrill them
A sexy, tough dairy farmer with an eye for investigation attacks clues left behind to a farming community struck by plague in Judy Clemens' unusual Till The Cows Come Home. Mystery fans will find plenty to thrill them in this hard-hitting first novel which comes to life with powerful characterization and unusual plots and sub-plots.
A great mystery
A great story about a great charecter. Judy Clemens Smucker has already mastered the art of story telling and the crafts of misdirection, plot and subplots. I read until midnight to finish this book and look forward to the next.
A great new mystery writer!
I found Till the Cows Come Home to be a wonderfully fresh mystery novel. The setting as well as the characters were very believable and the plot intriguing. The details about life on a dairy farm were especially well-written and her progtagonist a wonderful mixture of vulnerability and strength. Let's hope this is the beginning of a long, healthy writing career for this mystery author.
