{"id":2010,"date":"2022-09-08T18:53:57","date_gmt":"2022-09-08T18:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2010"},"modified":"2023-04-02T22:57:24","modified_gmt":"2023-04-02T22:57:24","slug":"feel-the-bern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2010","title":{"rendered":"Feel the Bern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love mysteries that feature the famous, from Walt Whitman to Dorothy Parker to Eleanor Roosevelt. But featuring a living celebrity\u2014in this case, Bernie Sanders\u2014is even more of a challenge, one that Shaffer succeeds at wonderfully. Gen Z intern Crash Robertson is our wisecracking intern and narrator, and after months of answering phones in the DC office\u2014from constituents who don\u2019t know how to text?\u2014she gets to accompany the senator on a fall-recess trip to Vermont. By chance, they head to Eagle Creek, Crash\u2019s hometown, and end up staying in her mother\u2019s B&#038;B. But what has the makings of a low-key visit with constituents, and plenty of apple griddlecakes, suddenly gets upended when Crash finds the body of the local banker floating in Lake Champlain. Crash\u2019s running commentary on Bernie\u2014who\u2019s always ready to deliver a lecture on the declining honeybee population, or the cozy series he\u2019s reading, set in a cannabis bakery in the Northwest\u2014makes for a good part of the humor in the book. But when a second citizen goes missing, it\u2019s time for our team to get down to work. The biggest suspect is a tech-obsessed one-percenter, think Elon Musk, who\u2019s buying up acres of maple trees, driving out local farmers, and monopolizing maple syrup production in a move Bernie dubs \u201cBig Maple.\u201d <strong>Unmitigated fun for everyone, no matter where they might fall on the political spectrum. Shaffer is also the author of the Obama mysteries, <em>Hope Never Dies<\/em> and <em>Hope Rides Again<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love mysteries that feature the famous, from Walt Whitman to Dorothy Parker to Eleanor Roosevelt. But featuring a living celebrity\u2014in this case, Bernie Sanders\u2014is even more of a challenge,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[76,128,55,90,164,51],"class_list":["post-2010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-cozy","tag-humorous","tag-mystery-detective","tag-political","tag-star","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Feel-the-Bern-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Feel-the-Bern-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}