Sometimes there’s weird coincidences in what I’m reading. As I’ve been chipping away at Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I began reading a series that I had first thought was simply a murder mystery before the appreciation of pieces of furniture and their connection to said murder came into play. It’s a congruity I never expect, but it’s the kind of small things that can make someone appreciate a series more as you feel immersed in the subject matter. And it’s why Gilt Frame by Matt Kindt, Margie Kraft Kindt, and Sophia Hilmes fully immerses you in the appreciation of a good chair before providing us with a twist.

Sam and his Aunt Merry keep stumbling into solving murders. They don’t necessarily mean to do it, but when one happens around them, they can’t help but weigh in and try to put the pieces together. When Merry wins a pair of French fauteuils at auction, she is continually harassed by the man she outbid. Why then would this man offer her even more to take them off her hands? When she is unable to find out more about the chair’s origin, she books a flight for her and her nephew to visit their point of origin to see if an expert in Paris can shed some light on the seats. But when the antiques dealer they’re meant to meet turns up dead and their chairs are similarly maimed, they have no choice but to try and solve the case before the French chief inspector.

Solving the case is less of a point of pride in their work and more self-preservation. As with any good mystery, there is a twist that isn’t quite obvious at first. In this case, we have an inversion of the mystery-solving duo being the perpetrators themselves. Not with any malice in their murder—they’ve only intentionally murdered Merry’s abusive husband—but this isn’t the first time that a body has turned up as the result of various hi-jinks that conspire around them. This twist on the twist creates a more exonerative feeling for the audience as a result—they’re not actively committing murder and they end up framing someone who was actually going to commit that same murder before the victim fell out of a window. And while this has happened a couple times, they still end up pinning it on someone who would have done the murder eventually, so it’s all fine. Right?

Gilt Frame is a fun snapshot of Sam and Aunt Merry and framed in such a way that we feel like we’re seeing only a small portion of a larger whole. They talk about the other cases they’ve “solved” in the past and it does make us wonder how those cases played out. While these three issues are all that exist of the characters, it gives Kindt, his mother, and Hilmes an easy entrance to revisit this world of accidental murder-turned solved mystery. 

Get excited. Get seated.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.