Under the Cover of Murder by Lauren Elliott / The Bookshop Murder by Merryn Allingham / The Witching Place by Sophie Love

Rating: WARTY!

Under the Cover of Murder by Lauren Elliott

"The town of Greyborne Harbor is abuzz over the wedding of the year, a glamorous affair on a yacht. When two bodies wash ashore during the festivities, Addie, bookshop owner" What the fuck difference does that make to anything? "...and maid of honor, searches for clues in the boat’s library." Of course she does because the police are consistently useless when it comes to solving murders and there's absolutely nothing they like better than a meddling little shit fucking-up the crime scene....

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The Bookshop Murder by Merryn Allingham

"A recent release" What difference does that make? This same plot has been used a hundred tiems before. "...that’s first in a charming series" of course it is, because why be inventive when you can endless retread the same plot? "When Flora" Seriously? Flora? "...opens her bookshop for the day, she’s startled to find a dead body inside!" She's the only one who's startled. Everyone else fully expected this. "She enlists the help of grumpy local crime writer Jack" who has the most tediously over-used name in literary history. Clearly this author hasn't even tried to feign being inventive or having an original idea. "...in order to solve the mystery and save her store’s reputation." What reputation? Why would a dead body in a bookstore destroy the store's reputation? On the contrary: once the crime scene is cleared, people will flock there. This is a dumbass story from the off. And why is this asshole Flora solving the mystery? The cops are useless? A bookstore owner with zero police training is the best one to solve a murder? Horseshit. Barf.

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The Witching Place: A Fatal Folio by Sophie Love

"After losing both her job and her boyfriend, Alexis makes a change and takes a job at an occult bookstore in a seaside town." This has everything, doesn't it? A chickenshit chick fleeing ebcause she has no spine, she works in a bookstore, she's a witch maybe, and she's solving murders? Fuck! What a bunch of retreaded crap. Three stories and each one esssentially exactly the same. No imagination. Nothing inventive. Not an original idea to be found here. Yawn.

The Witching Place by Sophie Love

Rating: WARTY!

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.