Here's a classic - a tediously-tired, over-done, boringly trope plot: "After being fired and breaking up with her boyfriend on the same day, Alexis makes a change and takes a job at an occult bookstore in a small seaside town. Caught up in the shop’s strange secrets, she finds herself smack-dab in the middle of a murder mystery…"
Of course she does, and the local cops are so stupid that she's the only one who can solve the murder, right? Is this a series starter? It must be! Yawn. So many tropes, so few pages to fit them all in. 'Weak woman runs away' is a genre all by itself. Why do so many female authors seem so determined to make their characters such little crying cowards?
The bookshop is another trope - obviously the woman must be smart if she works at a bookstore, right? Nope! Not if she works at a dumb-ass occult bookstore that palms-off garbage on suckers. What does that say about Alexis's integrity? Volumes! And why is it always a small seaside town? And the start of a series where this seaside town will be shown to have a higher murder rate than Chicago at the height of prohibition! Ridiculous.
It's a 'Cozy Mystery' but you know the best cozy mysteries? They're the ones you can toss onto the fire during a Texas winter, and enjoy the warmth as the pages burn. That's where books like this belong. On warmer days of course we can recycle them into pulp paper. That's what they were and what they will become. Trash is to ashes, pulp to pulp.
