There’s an uneasy atmosphere throughout Katherine Hall Page’s 26th Faith Fairchild mystery, The Body in the Web. It isn’t the mystery itself that creates that tension. It’s the fact that we all lived through some of the experiences of this book. Fairchild does a remarkable job reminding us what it was like, day-to-day, to live through the events of the early stages of the pandemic.

Although the story begins in January 2021, when Faith’s husband, Tom, is one of the early recipients of the new vaccine, we’re reminded what brought us to that point. In early March 2020, Faith’s sister, Hope, called her to tell her to stock up on supplies, and prepare to isolate. Hope took in their parents, while Faith’s son, Ben, returned from college, and her daughter took her high school classes online. Seniors in the community of Aleford, Massachusetts, evacuated to summer homes or Florida. Faith found one friend on the floor, prepared to die, with no food stocked in the house. Her catering company, Have Faith, turned to deliveries with Have Faith Delivered. Tom’s sermons were delivered via Zoom to an empty church as Ben streamed them.

Zoom. Faith started to hate it because she often wanted to hug the people on the other end. But, it was a Zoom town meeting that upset everyone when z Zoom Bomb exploded with nude pictures of a new resident, a friend of Faith’s. Although the town rallied around her, she resigned from her job. Faith is the one who finds her dead. The police chief calls it suicide or accidental death. Faith calls it murder. Together with Pix’s son-in-law, Faith digs into the woman’s past, looking for someone who hated her.

Page plays fair with the reader in that we know the events of the past long before Faith does, and there are suspicions. But, there are other reasons to appreciate this mystery. First, Faith does call for backup at the appropriate time, something that bothers me when the amateur sleuth fails to do that. And, despite the pandemic aspects of the story, there are recipes included and discussion of food and daily life. Life did have to go on.

It’s Katherine Hall Page’s masterful handling of COVID, though, that I admire. She says in an author’s note that she kept a diary during COVID. And, she utilized those events to stir memory. The Body in the Web may be about one woman trapped by her past. It’s also about all of us who were trapped by the pandemic, a memory we won’t forget.

Katherine Hall Page’s website is http://www.katherine-hall-page.org/

The Body in the Web by Katherine Hall Page. William Morrow, 2023. ISBN 9780063252530 (hardcover), 272p..

FTC Full Disclosure – I read a galley from NetGalley for a journal review.