Mrs. Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death

Book excerpt: You don’t have to be Jewish to love Rose Kaplan, the sharp-witted senior sleuth in “Mrs. Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death,” and her loyal sidekick Ida. You just have to love a geriatric mixture of murder, mystery, and laugh-out-loud humor, Holmes and Watson with a touch of Lucy and Ethel (and the occasional Yiddish curse). Mrs. K wins the honor of preparing her famous matzoh ball soup for her retirement home’s Passover seder. But when Bertha Finkelstein is discovered face down in her bowl of soup and Mrs. K is accused of causing her death, well, things turn really meshugge. It’s up to Rose and Ida to make like detectives and discover who really killed poor Bertha, an adventure that, in the words of best-selling mystery author Rita Mae Brown, is “Too deliciously funny!”