A Murder in Paris (A Year in Europe—Book 1) by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

"Many dream of dropping everything and jetting off to Europe — but having to solve a murder upon arrival? That definitely wasn’t what Diana intended when she left behind all of her responsibilities for the trip of a lifetime. Luckily, she makes a pretty decent sleuth," Stop right there. 'Sleuth' in a book blurb is an automatic 'No!" And why the hell is 'Diana' meddling in a murder in Paris? Because the French police are useless? This is a self-important Donald Trump-style delusion. "I alone can fix it?" Horseshit.

Left to Run by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

I think this title's missing a 'nowhere'! "As FBI special agent Adele Sharp..." stop right there! A book written by Pierce has an FBI agent named sharp? No. Just no. How can a novel with such a trite character name be considered cutting edge? Jsut aksing! Yawn.

Cause to Kill by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY! "Haunted by a tragic mistake..." - here we go; what detective novel doesn't feature a main character with a haunted past? Yawn. "...homicide detective Avery Black seeks redemption when a serial killer begins terrorizing college campuses. But her investigation could see her colliding with a monster as brilliant as she is." When doesn't the detective collide with a monster in these stories? What? The serial killer is really a nice guy? Now that would be a twist, but as it is, it's the path most traveled and boring as all get out.

The Making of Riley Paige by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This book is in three volumes, and I believe I got the first one as a freebie - the intention being to lure you into to buying the other two, but that ain't gonna happen, not given how poorly-written this first volume ("Watching") was. This marks the third Blake Pierce I've read and they've all been bad.

The story is of a serial killer on a college campus, and this girl who is not named Riley Paige, but Riley Sweeney, is having insights into the killer's mind. There is another series by the same author about this same character, but later in her life, so I'm guessing this is a prequel, and in the later series, Riley apparently married this guy she met in college, whose last name is Paige. But as I said, the problem with the book is that it's badly-written. At one point in the story, Riley is talking with her roommate who is named Trudy, about a girl named Rhea, who was murdered in the dorm, but a couple of times in that conversation, the author mistakenly calls Trudy 'Rhea' - like Riley is talking with the dead girl! There are several other such gaffes, such as where the author says "a voice for the grave" rather than 'a voice from the grave'. The quality of the editing is non-existent. I know as authors we all screw uo now and then, but this one seems like they're not even trying.

The real problem with it is that it feels so amateur in how it's written, and in order to tell the story, the author is having Riley do stuff that makes her look like a dumb-ass at times. For example, there's a killer on the loose, preying on female students. He evidently has the gift of the gab, and is suave enough for them to feel safe inviting him back to their room, but at a party, Riley invites this one guy she barely knows to her room without even thinking for a minute he might be the killer. He isn't as it turns out, but that was a stupid thing for her to do. The guy tries to rape her, but since she recently learned some self-defense moves, she magically overpowers him despite him also being trained in self-defense - he was in her class - and being bigger and stronger than her! It's badly-written.

It gets worse though! She finds this pocket knife in the guy's pants, and she doesn't think for a second about taking it out and handling it, and when she hands it to the police, they have no problem handling it either! There's no concern at all about wearing gloves, or about fingerprints or contamination, or evidence bags or chain of custody! It's amateur!

Riley takes this guy Ryan to bed with her on their first date when she barely knows him, and there's no mention of sexual history or condom use let alone any concern on her part that he might be the killer. Yes, we know she's going to marry him because this is a prequel, but she doesn't know that! More on this ridiculous relationship later.

After her own roommate is murdered, Riley is taken by this FBI guy who is now on the case down to the police station to watch an interrogation of a suspect, so she can share her insights with the FBI about whether she thinks he did it! After that, despite her being in shock earlier, and despite it being her roommate who was murdered, and despite her having no place to go since her room is a crime scene, no one offers to drive her anywhere or asks her if she'll be okay. They just let her walk out without taking a statement from her or anything! The author obviously did this so this guy Ryan could come pick her up, but it's stupid, and very poorly written.

From the start, and since we know it wasn't Ryan, it looked to me like the killer is one of two college professors. I suspected this from early on, but it makes absolutely no sense. At one point Riley has this insight that the killer was hanging out outside the bar where Rhea was partying the night she was killed, Riley felt that this guy started talking to her and Rhea invited him back to her dorm room! If it had been a fellow student, no one would have given it a second thought, but to claim that no one noticed an older man - a college professor who would have been recognized - hanging outside the bar where students gather, and walking and talking with Rhea or going back to her dorm? It made zero sense!

When Riley finally, belatedly, gets onto the idea that it was a college professor (so much for her brilliant insights), she goes to the library to check on something she read in a book that one of these two professors had written about the criminal mind, and she sees one of her professors at a computer terminal in the library. He greets her not as Riley Sweeney but as "Riley Paige!"! LOL! Badly written. After consulting this book, she decides she should call that same professor she just saw, and talk to him about her thoughts. Never once does she think to check the computer terminal where she'd just seen him! It's like she forgot she'd seen him only minutes before, and she immediately goes to a payphone to call him where she finds him in his office! Again, badly-written.

The weird thing is that when she's seeking him out, she asks herself, "But who else did she have to talk to about this?" - well duhh! The FBI agent who's all but recruited you! Again, badly written. What I suspect happened here is that the professor she saw in the library was actually the other professor, and not the one she phones and later meets, who happens to be the murderer. Again it was a writing screw up.

The saddest thing about the purported genius Riley-with-the-magical-insights is that she continually and persistently gets it wrong who the murder is! We, the readers, have known virtually from the start because the story is so badly-written, but Riley doesn't learn until she's trapped in a locked room with him. Even then she's still on the wrong track and the professor has to declare hismelf as the killer! That's how bad she is - and she has to be rescued by the FBI agent who conveniently has been tailing her all day hoping she will lead him to the killer! What?! Because that's with the FBI does - follow a flaky girl around, hoping desperately for a break in the case instead of going steadily through the evidence and eliminating or adding suspects until they finally nail the right one. Yup!

Finally: how do we know Riley has been having unprotected sex with Ryan? Well, he gets her pregnant. Yet more evidence of how profoundly stupid this woman is. But what evidence is there that there's anything else to do in this to do in this town, but party? Riley almost never goes to any classes during this story. She never studies. She has no job. She has no hobbies or pursuits. She's a senior, and she does nothing but party and agonize over who the killer is.

Oh and finding out she's pregnant long before it would show - because she has nausea. Not because she has some feminine insight, but nausea. Yeah. This novel is nauseatingly bad. So when Ryan shows up out of the blue at her graduation - where she's still wearing a neck brace because this novel is mind bogglingly telescoped - and he essentially proposes marriage, she's all on board even though she barely knows him, and the last time she was with him, things went badly and they broke up. This novel is shit. Honestly. Garbage. I condemn it. I have no interest in reading any more about Riley Sweeney-Paige or anything else from this author. Three strikes and you're out Blake Pierce!

Murder and Baklava by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

I made it to the 43% mark in this novel before I grew so sick of it that I couldn't stand to read anymore. No murder or anything like one had occurred by that point, and all the book had been was a rather poor tour guide of Budapest and Gyor. If I'd wanted that, I would have read an actual tour guide. I wanted a cruise ship murder and didn't get one! I'm reasonably sure there was one, but I was too bored to want to keep reading until it happened.

This is why I don't read these 'cozy' murder mysteries. First of all there's nothing cozy about murder and secondly, if anyone complains about my non-reviews, I can point them to this (and several others) where I did read all or part of the story and it was just as bad as I'd feared it would be. Many pages of this book were devoted to the author advertising all her other work, to a rather gauche and annoying degree. The story doesn't start until page 15. The contents is simply a list of chapter numbers (CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO, etc) which are tappable to get to the chapter, but then you can't tap back to the contents, so you're stuck there! I don't see the point of any of that.

I should have figured that a novel with a dumbass character name Like London Rose (apparently no relation to Tokyo) wouldn't be worth reading, and it wasn't, but this is the main character's name, and she's apparently going to have a series of endless murders which makes me want to run from her cruises rather than join one of them. Who would want to go cruising on a cruise line known for slaughtering passengers every cruise? The very premise is ridiculous.

Anyway, this is one of those cases where London ditches her fiancé and goes on the cruise as the social director, a role for which she frankly seemed inept to me. We learned precious little about each character, except for the one I am sure is on the chopping block for this cruise: an old, frail, and persnickety woman named Mrs Klimowski or something along those lines, who was obnoxious and who had an annoying toy breed dog which I am sure gets adopted by London at the end.

What we learned most about was the male interests London had, which were predictable and boring, and I had the sneakign feeling that one of them would be the murderer, but that's really just a wild guess. If London does adopt the dog, that would be another reason to ditch this series. I rarely read series and I won't look at one which features a pet on the cover or as a 'sidekick' to the 'sleuth' - in fact I won't read a murder mystery which has the word sleuth in the book description, because it sounds so pathetic and promises nothing save predictability and tedium.

The thing that really bothered me about London though, is that her last two boyfriends had each lasted a year despite her having zero interest in them. One has to wonder why she was even with them and that fact that she was, essentially, with them under false pretenses, makes me wonder both about her character and her smarts. In short, I didn't like London at all. That's another reason not to pursue this series and was one of the factors in my ditching this volume early.

This is yet another dumb-ass 'mystery' where someone entirely unqualified somehow seems to think it's incumbent on them to prove their innocence, but no! It's guilt that must be established, and unless a criminal investigation finds sufficient evidence to arraign you, you need do nothing save supply any information you may have about the crime that you're asked to do, and stay the fuck out of the investigator's way! It really is that simple! Anyone who doesn't do that is an interfering busybody and should be charged with impeding a police investigation! This book sucked majorly and the saddest thing about it all is that I was not surprised at all.

The Perfect Wife by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This authors seems to skip the article (definite or indefinite, it doesn't matter!) from time to time:
“He was only one The Panel would approve in the area.” (the only)
“Admittedly, it had required opening up to man who had killed almost twenty people;” (to a man)
“Whatever the reason, she’d had to go to other” (the other)
“He still didn’t know she’s told Mel about seeing Teddy with the hostess” (she'd told)

This novel needs to be retitled "The Perfect Ass-Wipe." The book is a poor cross between Silence of the Lambs and The Stepford Wives with some Sex and the City tossed in for rude measure. The interactions with the serial killer are pretty much a direct rip-off of Silence of the Lambs ("Quid pro quo, Clarice!"), but it felt like the author couldn't figure out what kind of a novel he wanted to write.

This woman, for an FBI profiler wannabe and supposedly a promising candidate, seems remarkably stupid, and her husband is a jerk, but she can't see it. So on the one hand we're supposed to believe she's really sharp as a profiler, but on the other we're expected to swallow that she's completely dumb when it comes to profiling the motives of her friends and her husband - and his best friend.

She and hubby move to a new elite neighborhood when he's assigned to an office there, where he manages people's financial investments - so they're really well-off. He insists they join this ridiculous elite marina club (which she ought to have flatly-refused as soon as she learned that men (known as Oath Minders) often meet separately from women (known as Hearth Keepers). Seriously? She sure as hell ought to have quit when she learned that one of the activities enjoyed there is free love for husbands. I don't know of any self-respecting woman who would who doesn't vote Republican who would put up with any of that horseshit, but as with everything else, this Jessie girl mutely goes along with every single thing her husband Kyle, dumps on her. And he dumps a lot.

Things slowly deteriorate and come to a head when she catches him snorting cocaine with his friend Ted, and kicks him out. He comes back all contrite the next day promising reform, and she pretty much instantly forgives him. That night, they go to a party down at the marina. She's just learned she's pregnant, but she decides to drink some champagne anyway. My guess is that her sleaze of a husband put something in her drink, because after a couple of sips she began to feel woozy. Rather than have her husband take her home, she let him put her to bed in the cabin on the boat that belongs to Ted! Someone needs to give her a Ted talk! LOL! She has to be a moron to do that, given what she knows at this point.

I thought she'd wake up and find she'd been raped by Ted, but instead she wakes up next to the dead body of this woman she'd had an argument with earlier over flirting with her husband, and she has blood and skin under her fingernails. Instead of calling the police, this imbecile lets her husband talk her into disposing of the body, so now she's completely trapped.

She didn't agree to it outright because she felt so woozy, which ought to have told her she'd been drugged, but she was alert enough to have stopped him and she didn't. For her to even consider doing something like that given what career she was supposed to be following, is completely ridiculous, and I lost all interest in reading anything more about this bozo right then.

It was pretty obvious her husband was the murderer, and he'd bene having an affair with this woman who was going to expose him. It was obvious from the writing, but also from the fact that an author like this one is never going to let his favorite profiler get tied down with a husband and a baby at the start of a series, not when he can follow the safe road most traveled! I don't mind if a book starts out with a stupid character who wises up later, but to have an author depict a woman who he claims on the one hand is sharp and smart, yet who he depicts consistently choosing the dumbest option in any situation which faces her, is misogyny, period.

I resented the time I spent reading even half of this. If she'd been remotely as smart and sharp as was claimed, Jessie (the name says it all in this case!) would have refused to dispose of the body, called the police, and had herself drug-tested - and especially done all this given her career choice! She did the exact opposite and doesn't merit having a story told about her. Warty to the max on this one.