Author: Ellie DeFarr
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
Erratas and curiosities:
P63 "Any suspicions of fowl play…" should be "Any suspicions of foul play…" unless the character has a pet chicken.
Chapter 31 (paragraph 4) "...preferring to follow from behind..." - how else would one follow?!
"He seemed do distraught." I forget the location, but this clearly should be "He seemed so distraught."
This novel, which has a title that sounds like a children's book, isn't. It is one of a series, but each episode is discrete, so you don’t have to have read the first, or the whole preceding set (however many or few that might tally) to enjoy this one. I appreciated that! I was immediately drawn-in because this is a PI story, but it isn't told in first person PoV, which I detest, so major kudos to the author for being independent and original in that regard. Unfortunately, it failed to keep my interest.
Another reason I was drawn-in was that private investigator Hera Hunter (yeah, I know the name is a little bit too much like 'Hero', but I let that slide!) is very different. We first meet her in this story dispatching a child molester and murderer who got away with his last crime. Hera, 29, was a marine sniper and she took out this criminal in a park early one morning, and sauntered off home without a hint of guilt for her action. This lack of remorse or feeling is important for her later inexplicable reactions.
Next she's breaking into the home of a dishonest collector of valuables to steal back a precious diamond which the collector stole on behalf of some criminal element, and additionally, she's worrying over the unidentified body of an Asian woman found in a park. The body is unidentified, yet the police are somehow convinced she's not a prostitute. I don't get how they figured that out! I also found it rather too convenient how many useful coincidences crop up during Hera's investigations! She's always overhearing vital conversations, or seeing odd things going on that prove of use later, or meeting or hearing of people who are crucial to her solving the crime. It was too much.
I had an issue with the ubiquitous invincible hacker motif, too. Hera's partner at her PI agency is able to hack into anything just by tapping a few keys. Bullshit! That trope is tired and sad, and not even remotely realistic. As I said, I did like the story from the start, but the big question was, with issues like this cropping up so often, could the author keep me liking it? No, she couldn't.
There were too many white caps that hindered smooth sailing here. One big one, was a little yappy dog named "Lucky" belonging to Hera, which she literally takes everywhere with her, including into bars and along to visits with potential clients without even offering them courtesy of asking if it’s okay. This was absurd at best. I'm a dog lover but even I would draw the line somewhere. In this novel no one ever does and that was way beyond the bounds of credibility.
Like Lassie, Lucky has almost superhuman (or more appropriately, super-dog) instincts which are slightly improbable at best and farcical at worst. For example, Lucky can always tell if someone is a bad person, and is almost shark-like at detecting the faintest trace of a smell. That made the dog seem like it was from some cheesy kid's story.
The dog was written just like a human character, being given little comments here and there, such as in: "Arf, arf," the dog said, or as in: Lucky added, "Yip Yip", and so on. I found this juvenile and annoying, worthy of a middle-grade children's novel, but not an adult private-eye story. Initially this dog feature didn't irritate me too much, but the dog kept cropping up like that sad-ass Microsoft Windows "help dog" they used to have, and it was for no good purpose at all. I thought the dog was going to play a part in the mystery because it was featured so much. Thankfully it didn't, but this begs the question as to why we're hit over the head with little growly dog every few paragraphs?
Another oddity was that pretty much every significant guy Hera meets is very tall. I have no idea what that's all about, but this novel was introducing one such guy almost every ten pages in the first half of the book! Weird! It's not surprising that I quickly reached the point where there were too many things bothering me to enjoy this. One of the tall guys was a sleazy politician who happened to be related to Hera's assistant. The number of times he stopped by her office, the two of them had ample opportunity to record his voice and get him into serious trouble, yet they never did. Given Hera's radical action with the child molester, it seemed that she had way too much forbearance with the politician. It made no sense.
Another annoyance was the author's habit (I noticed it more than once) of reminding us of things which happened only a few pages before, and which were significant enough that your typical reader is highly unlikely to have forgotten unless they have some serious cognitive issues. One example of this is that Hera's (foster) sister is the proprietor of a brothel called 'Knickers' in town. Once I read that I didn't need to be reminded of it.
Hera is represented as a bit of a vigilante, hunting down the bad guys, and especially the ones who got away with it (that is until her own brand of thug-justice catches up with them), but the problem with that is that it disappears when she discovers her father! This is the man who shot her mother when she was a child and then fled, and who has been on the loose ever since - and who is very possibly a material witness in a case upon which she has just begun working. In fact, he's worse than that, but Hera does nothing about him!
Instead of shooting him out of anger, or more smartly, turning him in to the police as a murderer and a potential vital witness in another shooting, she just walks away. This was not only totally out of character given her previous behavior, it made her look completely inept if not downright stupid.
The situation was made worse by her schizophrenic attitude towards her dad. At one point she almost feels sad for him, at another she walks away from him, indifferent, at another she's infuriated by his behavior. It made no sense whatsoever, and served only as another annoyance for me. Admittedly Hera's idea of love is rather warped, and kudos to the author for not giving her a trope male love interest, but her attitude towards her foster parents was at best oddball.
As for the mystery, it was rather run-of-the-mill, and not very gripping. It was obvious who the bad guy was from the beginning, so there was no mystery there. Once we knew 'who', it was only a matter of what he was doing. This will probably be obvious to some readers, although it wasn't to me, I confess, but it seemed highly unlikely he would be doing what he was doing in such a relatively small town.
So while I was really drawn into this to begin with, it quickly became an annoying novel which I was glad to have finished so I could move on to something more engaging. I can't in good faith recommend this one. It didn't leave me with any desire at all to read any more in this series.
