Rating: WARTY!
This novel promised sufficient differences from the usual female-centric murder mystery (no cupcakes or coffee-bars here) that it sounded very appealing, but in the end it proved itself to be so lacking in credibility and so full of trope that it turned me off. The best part about it turned out to be that one, it was not first person voice, for which I heartily thank the author, and two, it was very short - only one-hundred fifty pages or so, again for which I offer thanks, otherwise I might have had to DNF this one.
The main character, Irene Seligman is essentially blackmailed to leave her comfortable and rewarding life in New York City to move back to home town Santa Fe, New Mexico, because her mother is a cruel parasite. Despite her job being that of an assistant district attorney, she abandons that "prestigious job" completely for no reason that we're given, and opens a very upscale designer clothing consignment store. This abrupt and dramatic switch in career choice made absolutely no sense to me because it had no roots or background, but I was even willing to let that slide in the hope of a good story. Unfortunately I didn't end-up with the bargain some of the shoppers in the store got!
The morning she opens her brand new store, Irene discovers a dead body in one of the closets. I was willing to run with that, but by the time I reached the end of the novel, I had seen no reason offered as to why this body had been left in her store. The store was locked and someone had to pick the lock or use a duplicate key to get in there and dump the body. It made no sense and didn't fit with what I later learned of the perps. Maybe I missed the explanation, but I didn't miss that despite the victim having evidently been killed elsewhere and dumped here the scene was described in a way that suggested the murder was done right there. How that worked is an unexplained mystery, and there were too many of these in this novel.
This novel is one more example of how the cover artist never reads the novel he or she is illustrating for, and ends up drawing a cover which bears no relationship whatsoever to the events. The cover shows a woman in a purple skirt with what look like Christian Louboutin's on her feet and wearing something white around her torso. She's lying in a relaxed fetal position on her left side. Here's the description of the corpse from the very first page of the novel:
The dead woman sat with her legs straight out, her upper body leaning against the wall. She was dressed in blue silk Prada pants. She wore a brown silk jacket, also Prada.In other words she looked nothing like the cover. This is why I ignore covers when picking a novel to read. They're meaningless and irrelevant. They have no respect for the author, because the author routinely has little or nothing to do with the cover unless they self publish.
The problems didn't stop there. Here is the description of the woman's appearance: "The woman herself had been an attractive blonde." I'm sorry, but what does the fact that she's attractive have to do with anything? Would the murder have been less of a tragedy if she'd been an ugly brunette? I seriously don't think so! So why describe her as attractive?
If it had been written in first person, this might have made some sense because some people do think like that - that a murder is more tragic if the victim is pretty, but this was not first person. The other side of this coin is Irene's later observation of her aging mother. "Seeing her now in the bright light without her makeup, Irene thought she looked every day of the seventy years she’d lived." So we have an announcement here that without make-up, women are ugly, especially when they're older women, who quite obviously from this should never put their face out in public without a pretty mask of make-up to hide it behind. How cruel can you get?
But Irene's behavior never did make sense. She used to be an assistant DA, yet everything she does here gets in the way of the police investigation. She repeatedly ignores, for example, direct orders for the police and thereby risks contaminating crime scenes. Her behavior is inexcusable, and not something a DA would do. There are ways to force her, by good plotting, to do these things if they're necessary to the story, but none of that was in evidence here. Consequently, Irene simply looked like a stupid, interfering busy-body who was betraying her entire career training, and doing it for no reason whatsoever.
Perhaps it's needless to say after that, I did not like Irene at all, and I loathed her mother who was one of the most clueless, vapid, and vacuous characters ever to disgrace the pages of a novel. In fact I don't think there was a single character I did like in this novel. All the women are presented as gossiping busy-bodies. All the men are macho or boyish in one way or another. There's nothing in between. None of the characters was interesting. It was pretty obvious from early-on who the villain was and who the good guy in disguise was.
Irene's painfully obvious love interest was right out of the young adult trope stockpile: "He was tall, and he had blue eyes set in a square-jawed, high-cheekboned face and a boyish shock of blond hair that fell across his forehead." Barf. He's randomly referred to as "J.P." or "P.J." like the author couldn't decide which she preferred. That needs to be corrected before this goes to final print. I know that advance review copies are disclaimed as an "uncorrected proof" but that, in this day and age, is no excuse at all. We do not live in an age where people write novels out by hand or laboriously type them on a typewriter, and then the type has to be set in leads in a literal galley tray and painstakingly corrected. We have search & replace. We have spell-checkers. We have grammar checkers (although I don't recommend Microsoft's, which sucks). This doesn't catch all errors by any means and I sympathize with authors having to read and re-read their work, believe you me, but we ought not to be seeing mixed-up initials.
There's a lawyer who is nothing but an obnoxious stalker yet Irene seems to have no problem with him despite his pushy nature and the fact that he inexplicably knows everything about her despite having literally just met her. He flatly refuses to accept that "No!" means "Hell, no!" yet she doesn't find this remotely suspicious! She puts it down to living in a small town, yet Santa Fe, with a population close to seventy thousand is not a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. This guy is a creep and still Irene allows him to drive her home. She's an idiot.
At one point, there's a golden opportunity to discover the identity of one of the villains because she actually came into Irene's store, make a purchase, and pays with a credit card, yet never does Irene have the smarts when she later learns this woman is bad news, to go back and look at the receipt and report her identity to the police. She must have been an utterly lousy assistant DA.
Irene makes no sense, especially as someone with DA affiliations. She is very reticent about giving information to the cops despite him asking questions about the corpse discovered in her closet. She repeatedly reminds herself not to tall him too much, and there's no reason whatsoever for her attitude. Yet later, again for no reason, she spills her guts to someone else with a load of unbidden and extraneous information: "She didn’t tell me anything about a struggle. She just called and told me she’d found a building and used the money I wired her to pay the first month’s lease. She said she got a good deal on a building that had been vacant for several months." Again it made no sense.At one point, against expressed police orders, Irene decides she must visit a location out of town (instead of simply telling the police about it), but instead of going right then, when her store has been forcibly closed because of the dead body and police investigation, she puts off the trip until another day when she has to leave the store full of valuable merchandise in the care of a brand new hire whom she doesn't know, and who is supposed to be part-time. She doesn't even tell him she will be gone. He has no keys to the store and isn't told she will be away, yet he manages to open the store with no problem! Maybe he's the one leaving the dead bodies?! LOL! Seriously, this made no sense, and this novel was full of this kind of out of left field inexplicable behavior.
In the end, not remotely liking the main character and finding the story repeatedly making no sense, I cannot in good faith recommend this one.
