SHADOWS AT THE SPRING SHOW from author Lea Wait, offers readers of endearing mysteries a fourth look at Wait’s American History professor/antique print dealer Maggie Summer.  In this installment, classes at Sommerset College have finished for the year, freeing Maggie to focus all her energies on organizing Sommerset County ’s first – hopefully “annual” – antique show.  It is something she suggested to help raise money for OWOC, Our World Our Children, an international adoption agency she supports and through which she is also considering becoming an adoptive parent.

The agency’s director, Carole Drummond, Korean in nationality, was a beneficiary of the same international adoption she now espouses.  She places needy children, irrespective of race or culture, within families seeking to adopt.   Maggie, while hoping for motherhood, begins to face some doubts towards her own readiness to fill that void in a child’s life after she meets with Ann Shepard, another prospective adoptive single parent, who is virulently upset. 

Ann is talking lawsuit action against OWOC.  They are refusing to consider her petition to adopt a white child on the same level as a two-parent family.  Carole has explained to her other races are far more in need, and she could adopt far more quickly a child outside the white race; but Ann has her doubts towards such a mixing.  She has trouble believing she could properly and fully meet the differing needs a child from a different culture than her own would present.

These same doubts, now presented, begin troubling Maggie’s own thoughts as well.

Priority, though, resides with the upcoming show.  Maggie is a veteran of antique shows, but this will be her first as organizer.  Will it come off without any hitch?  Not if the mysterious person who is sending threatening letters to OWOC, calling Maggie demanding she cancel the show, and blowing up vehicles to intimidate everyone involved has anything to say.  And what of Jackson and Holly Sloane?  Is there a connection?  Jackson, the adoptive son of Rob and Holly Sloane, goes missing after Holly is shot and sent to the hospital.  What is going on here?  And what on earth does it have to do with antiques and adoption?

For myself, I believe, the mystery of what exactly was going on became the impetus to keep me reading SHADOWS AT THE SPRING SHOW.  My knowledge of antiques could never come close to discerning what exists as a valued antique and what is nothing but useless junk; but the basis as to why anyone would seek to shut down such an endeavor of worthy benevolence is compelling.  It doesn’t make any sense why someone would be against adoption!  There lies the mystery that propels a reader forward.

Initially, I thought Wait was throwing too much information at the reader.  For those not familiar with the world she presents, the story began to read like a how-to book on antique shows and the virtues of being an adoptive parent.  Then, as the story progressed, I saw the whole plot begin to revolve around adoption, a seemingly harmless topic; while the organizing of the show was an elongated assembling of the suspects drawn out over the course of chapters, rather than merely a final climatic scene.

This becomes evident when Maggie alludes to the threatening message on her answering machine as being a voice she knew – though, at the time, failed to recognize. 

SHADOWS AT THE SPRING SHOW was a mystery that was indeed a true mystery.  It wasn’t about solving a murder.  No one is certain until the very end whether or not the one murder committed in the book is even related to the threats.  This is a mystery about who, and of course why, anyone would seek to shut down an antique show that is geared to benefit children needing families.  The answer, when revealed, offers everyone something to think about.