The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard

Rating: WARTY!

This sounded great from the description, but about halfway through, it turned into one of those pathetic little horror movies where the girl is running from the indestructable and unstoppable bad guy, and I quit right there. It's not a YA story - the protagonist is a commendable 47 years old, but once she began behaving like a YA screamer girl (sans the screaming, thankfully) I had to get out of there. On top of that, the story was already plodding, to the point where I was starting to become bored and listless with the 'not going anywhere any time soon' plot, even before the idiot scene that proved to be the final straw for me.

Umiko Wada works as an assistant to a private detective, but after a visit from a mysterious and well-off woman, her boss is killed in a suspicious hit and run, and Umiko decides to pursue the dangerous investigation, hopping to London, the USA, and Iceland, but every time she moves, we get a crumb of a clue, and that's all. And naturally it's all tied to a bad event in her past because all these stories are.

Finally she heads to a mysterious property in the middle of nowhere on Iceland, and they take an inappropriate rental vehicle in bad weather. Magically their trip coincides with a visit from the bad guy, who kills her companion. Umiko commendably hits him with her vehicle, but instead of making sure he's dead and taking his own four-wheel drive vehicle while rendering her own unusable, she takes off in her own useless car, leaving the bad guy to inevitably resurrect and follow her. That was enough for me. It's so trope and it tells me the protagonist is a moron, and I have no intention of pursuing cliched novels about stupid women. I can't commend this based on what I could stand to plow through.

Bed and Breakfast and Murder by Patti Larsen

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those murder mysteries that's so pathetic I don't give it the time of day, but once in a while I like to punish myself by trying to read a sample of one of those genres I so despise, if only to make sure my take on them really is as bad as it seems, and this one served only to confirm that. It is well known that standards are laughably low for this genre, but even by those rock-bottom criteria, this one was a fail with juvenile humor, OCD fart jokes, and one-dimensional characters, the main one of which was consistently obnoxious.

The story is your typical unimaginative clone of every other such story: Fiona Fleming inherits a B&B and just for good measure, is also is fleeing New York City precisely because she's a failure. It's the usual garbage: she loses her boyfriend and her job and flies the coop like the worthless little chickenshit she is, yet somehow she stupidly imagines that she can make a go of a business venture despite being a disaster on two inevitably shapely, manly-man-attracting legs. Yawn.

Why female authors so delight in depicting worthless women is a source of unending wonder to me. Does it somehow make them feel better about their own lives? I don't know. I can't think of any valid reason for so many female authors to take such delight in ruthlessly killing off the dreams of so many weak female characters. That's the only real murder mystery here. There's certainly nothing new, original, or inventive to be had from this genre: it's just another unqualified female meddling in police business that she has no business interfering with.

It's first person voice, so it sucks for that alone, and it's just stupid: idiotically written and going nowhere fast. I couldn't stand to read more than a few pages of this piece of trash without gagging at how bad and unrealistic it truly was. So no: I am not wrong about this particular genre, because every time I give it a chance, it turns out to be exactly as I feared it would be.

Under Dark Skies by AJ Scudiere

Errata: "the Jeremy Kite incidence" I think the author means 'incident'. "He couldn’t figure it out." Should be ‘She couldn’t figure it out’

I am avowedly not into werewolf or vampire stories for the most part because they're far too cookie-cutter: each one is a clichéd clone of the last, especially if it's a YA story (which this blessedly is not). This particular one promised to be different and thankfully it started out quite differently, and I liked it very much, but the more I read, the less I liked it because it was so trudging and inauthentic, and although the author took a commendably different tack with the werewolf part of the story - which is something I advocate authors to do, but so rarely see - she fell down on the realism with regard to the FBI investigation over missing children.

One immediate problem with this narrative is that while it is thankfully not in first person, it is told alternatingly from the perspectives of the main two characters, which means tediously going over the same ground we already covered, but from the other protagonist's perspective. That became an irritant in short order, and led to me quickly skipping portions of the text where this happened.

One sad trope the author didn't skip I'm sorry to say, was the haunted backstory that I've seen done to death far too many times and of which I am so bored. Are there no detectives who don't have a haunted past? No PI's? No FBI agents? No CIA officers? LOL! Not in the fictional world there are not, and it is such a tired trope. FBI agent Eleri is a woman whose lost sister has haunted her for years (not literally). Donovan is a werewolf. Both work for the FBI division of Nightshade, although they may as well be regular FBI agents for all the part that 'nightshade' actually plays in this story.

Eleri is the experienced agent and she plays mentor to Donovan, who is a new recruit who was previously a medical examiner, so the pair are like Fox and Mulder from X-Files with genders reversed. Other than that, this isn't remotely like X-Files. It's simply a missing children story, so why nightshade division needed to be involved is a mystery. That said, I read only fifty percent of this before giving up on it, so I may have missed something more supernatural toward the end.

At one point they locate a dead body in a shallow grave and Eleri supposedly helps excavate the body, but I seriously doubt that an FBI field agent would be on her knees digging up a body when an expert forensic team is there. She would just get in the way and mess up stuff. I may be wrong - I'm not an FBI expert, but it just seemed off base to me. There were times reading this when it felt like the author was putting shit into the story just to show off how much research she'd done rather than getting on with the story. I don't appreciate it when authors do that. If you feel like some things need to be in there, then there are much more subtle ways of doing it than were exhibited here.

The story has it that children are going missing and it's connected to a religious cult called The Children of God, situated in a remote part of Texas, so the agents head down there and then hit such an unrealistic series of coincidences that it became too much. On top of that, there was a lethargy about raiding the cult's camp that was utterly insupportable. That's why I quit reading in the end. I guess the author did it to have a big showdown at the end, but it came off as just plain stupid.

So, first absurd coincidence is that while out reconnoitering the cult's compound as his werewolf self, by accident, Donovan encounters a kid called Joshua who has escaped the compound. He's bleeding badly from a wound apparently inflicted with the edge of a shovel, and he has a broken arm and bruises, and Donovan and Eleri take him to a hospital, but despite the kid's descriptions of the brutal life there, do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to sleep the night.

Second, and again purely by accident, they find a girl also from the camp, and who tells the same kind of stories about it that Joshua has told them. This girl is identified as one of the missing girls, and her story corroborates everything Joshua has already told them. She has also been badly treated. Do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to eat.

Next, and again purely by coincidence, they encounter a truck driver who has picked up one or two kids from the camp and helped them out. He corroborates a story about a girl from the camp who sought medical help at a hospital, and later was killed in the camp, according to Joshua. Do they raid the place? Hell no! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about the endless Texas heat. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit and piss-poor writing. This is thoroughly unrealistic and just stupid. It really turned me off the story and that's when I quit reading. It was too much.

I liked that Eleri's power was that she would dream true things and this helped the investigation, but there were still issues with this: in that she wasn't much more aggressive in finding her missing sister who she dreamed of often. There was a poor excuse made for why she didn't, but given that this supposedly haunted her for years, it made no sense that she hadn't pursued it when younger. I think that the young Eleri's quest to rescue her sister would have made a better story than this one turned out to be.

The werewolf part of the story I liked for the most part, but there were problems even with that. For example when he's investigating the compound, the author has Donovan's wolf sprint at over 30 mph for an hour, which isn't possible. Wolves can reach some 30 mph, but only in short bursts, and from the pseudo-scientific descriptions that are given, Donovan's change from human to wolf is a physical thing involving readjustment of his bones, which makes it seem like, rather than become a wolf, he's really a worst of both worlds wolf-human hybrid, and therefore he'd be hampered by his change, not enhanced by it. And no explanation is given for why two species as disparate as a dog and a human, would even remotely have a hybrid.

It's supposed to be through mutations, but given that canines and humans have not shared a common ancestor for well over forty million years, there's nothing to support even a fictional attempt to pretend there's any science involved in the hybrid. Plus, if two organisms can mate and successfully produce viable offpring, they're the same species, so this hybrid idea is nonsensical unless you keep it purely in the supernatural realm. You can't turn pure fiction into science. The idiot creationists learned that a good while back.

At one point the author has Donovan say, of his enhanced sense of smell, "I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans." He's trying to suggest this is why his sense of smell works so much better than most, but that's not actually how it works - not all of it. Dogs have a unique organ in the base of the nose called Jacobson's organ, for example, that humans do not have - or anything like it. They also have maybe as many as 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose whereas humans have some six million, so yes, having a large area for detecting smells is important, but it would be larger than any human has, and it's no good unless you have the brainpower to process that information.

Dogs devote 40 times more brainpower to processing smells than do humans. All of this ultimately goes back to your genetic complement. The olfactory receptor part of the vertebrate genome is the largest genome superfamily, signifying how important it is to us, and whereas humans have around 900 'smelling genes', rodents have almost twice that many. We have a lot that are broken and useless because they were no longer critical to our survival, so there was no evolutionary benefit to maintaining them, whereas dogs have a stunningly impressive ability to smell tiny concentrations of odor, so there's no doubt they have more functional genes in this department than we do. None of this is even mentioned in Donovan's 'explanation'. I felt more could have been done, or else the author needs to abandon any attempt to pretend there's any sort of rational scientific basis behind Donovan being a werewolf and just leave it in the supernatural.

As it was, I could have let those things slide, but the trudging and lethargic pace of the investigation, which led to me skipping parts of the narrative just to get past those bits, together with the absurd coincidences and lucky breaks, the obsession with inner monologues, with the Texas heat, and with dining and sleeping arrangements, and the complete lack of anyone's interest in raiding a cultist camp that was clearly abducting and abusing children and women was so ridiculous that I couldn't stand to read any more of this. I'm done with this series and with this author.

Murder in the South of France by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Rating: WARTY!

I knew this novel was not for me when I read, "He was actually quite handsome, Maggie realized with surprise." What I realized with no surprise is that it was actually quite the contrary: it's entirely predictable that this single woman would meet a guy - two in fact, each better than the last - so no. No surprise at all. Not in a novel like this, written by a female author who seems to think a woman needs to be validated by a man in every novel she writes.

No, that's not my invention, it's apparently the view of the book description writer who predictably gets it wrong: "Maggie Newberry is sheltered, privileged but also a whip-smart" No, she isn't! Would a whip-smart person hand over €30,000 to a man she just met and has never seen, without - at the very least - asking for some sort of ID and a receipt?

Nope! "Whip-smart" just hands it over, no questions asked. "Fast on her feet" is a complete misdirection since the story moves with a glacial pace. But that she's "a little stunned to realize that she's 34 years old and still hasn't found 'the one' " is what supports my contention above. Maggie is a desperate woman created by yet another female author who thinks every woman needs a man to validate her.

The story is that Maggie's "long-missing sister" Elise turns up dead in France, apparently shot in the head and dumped into water. Maggie is tasked with going to identify the body and also to take the money to pay off this shady guy who claims he can kidnap Elise's daughter, Maggie's niece, from her father and get her into the USA on a fake passport, and Maggie has no issue whatsoever with any of this. She has zero thought for the child's welfare or what's actually best for her niece. Instead, she takes her cue entirely from these shady guys she's only just met.

I didn't like Maggie from the very start, or how she was introduced in a tedious info-dump. And how she explained - to the French officials at customs - all that money is glossed over. Just like the Americans, the French take an interest in anything over ten thousand currency units. How did Maggie get that amount of money so quickly? Yes, it was from her father, but if she didn't take it with her, then how did she get that much from a French bank at short notice? If she did take it with her, how did her father lay his hands on that much cash at short notice? No explanation is offered.

I understood even less why the author set the novel in France and then proceeded to diss French men! Main character Maggie is predictably paired with a guy who's described as "Broad chested and tall, he was easily six foot four which was unusual for a Frenchman." This is horseshit. The average Frenchman is taller than the average American and right on par, to within an inch or so, of every other male in the western world. The French men's basketball team in the 2021 Olympics, for example, was two inches taller than the US team on average. So no, a six foot four male in France isn't unusual, jackass.

For an author who is supposedly a Francophile, you'd think she'd know this. You'd think she'd know about France. You'd think she'd know French. That this is a "TOTALLY NEW AND REVISED EDITION!" suggests it required work even after it was first published, but rest assured, it still needs work. My question here though, is: why did it need to be totally new and revised? What was wrong with it before? And why was it published in that condition?

Why Maggie has to go and identify a corpse that's bloated beyond recognition from submersion in water, when the DNA has already been confirmed is also a mystery, but a bigger mystery is how did they obtain the DNA sample against which the corpse's DNA was verified? And how were they able to do it so quickly? Again, the author says not a word about that. So by this point, barely into the story at all, I was already tired of the clichéd writing and the poor plotting and I detested the main character, so there was no point whatsoever in reading on. This novel sucks shit like a starving fly, and I sure as hell have no intention whatsoever of reading a whole series about this dickhead. Slap a Newber(r)y on it! LOL!

A Lady's Guide to Etiquette and Murder by Dianne Freeman

Rating: WARTY!

"In this sparkling mystery, wealthy American widow Frances Wynn arrives in Victorian London - but soon becomes a suspect in her late husband's murder." Because if there isn't an American in it, it's a waste of time reading it, right? Non-starter.

Desecration by JF Penn

Rating: WARTY!

"DS Jamie Brooke enlists the help of clairvoyant Blake Daniel to follow a macabre trail of murder, grave robbery, and genetic modification..." and finds out she's a lying-ass fraud? Just a suggestion. Have you noticed the psychics in these stories (books and movies) never offer a damned thing that really helps - only the vaguest of clues so the author can spin the story on and on. It would be more of a challenge if the psychic nailed the perp down to name and address and the author still managed to find a good story. Why don't I do that? Maybe I will.

But no psychic ever solved a murder. Ever. Period. Cops do that. Not psychics. Not bakers. Not librarians. Not café owners. Not cupcake shop owners. Not ladies' knitting circles. Not bookshop owners. Cops. Hard-working cops. That's it.

Double Fudge Brownie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Rating: WARTY!

"As a baker, Hannah knows her craft inside out… But when she becomes a murder suspect, can she find the recipe for proving her innocence?" Innocence doesn't have to be proved. Guilt does. But this story is just a fluke so don't sweat it.

Murder By Page One by Olivia Matthews

Rating: WARTY!

The book description was enough to rate this a zero: "After relocating from Brooklyn to Georgia, librarian Marvey expected her life to slow down. But when a dead body turns up at the local bookstore, and her friend becomes a suspect, Marvey teams up with newspaper owner Spence to uncover the truth." Ri-ight. Because no one is better qualifed to solve a murder than a librarian looking for a quiet life and a newspaper reporter. Teams of librarians and reporters are are solving crimes with a record success-rate all over the world because the police are utterly useless. R-ight! Barf. Definitely no on this one.

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.

Two Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J Sobol

Rating: WARTY!

This is an amalgamation of three volumes that Sobol published starting in 1969, the final one coming out in 1975. Readers may know him better for his Encyclopedia Brown series which was extensive and which ran from 1963 to 2012. I've never read any of those, and I'm disinclined to do so after reading these stories, which are short, but rather violent, and often so simplistic, or so arcane, or so out of date that they're really not very entertaining. The book contains some 200 of them and my understanding is that many of these were actually in the Encyclopedia Brown series originally.

Each story covers only two pages in print, with the solution to the mystery printed (for reasons which escape me) upside down at the bottom of the second page. All of them are solved by Doctor Haledjian who hands-down beats Hermione Granger for being an insufferable know-it-all. He's obnoxious, and no one person could know all that he supposedly knows about every little thing. Worse than this though is that he's in every story, and nearly all of them are murders and robberies, which makes me highly-suspicious. How come so many serious crimes occur around Haledjian?! LOL!

The mysteries are of the nature of, for example, a guy supposedly entering a house from a freezing outdoors and claiming he saw a thief, and Haledjian calling him a liar on the basis that the guy's eyeglasses would have misted up as soon as he entered the warm house, and therefore he would have seen nothing. I'm serious, that's what they're like - all of them, except, for example, the ones which require you to know in detail how the old Pullman rail sleeping cars are organized, and so on.

Another example is where this guy wants to impress a girl so he hires a professional boxer to come on to the girl and then 'knocks him out' to impress her. The girl sees through this because the guy's eyeglasses, which he placed in his coat top pocket prior to fighting, survived the encounter unbroken despite the prize fighter delivering several body blows. The idea is that the eyeglasses must have broken, but that's not necessarily true. Even if they were hit, they might have survived and there was a relatively low chance that they'd be hit anyway, since a boxer would be punching to the abdomen and solar plexus rather than high on the chest. Despite that, this girl, who is all starry-eyed after the fight, suddenly rejects the guy (as she rightly should, it must be said) not because of the improbability of this wimpy guy surviving an assault from a prize fighter and then knocking him out cold with one punch, but solely on the basis of the eyeglasses being intact!

Another case of trapping a criminal hinges on the confusion between Anchorage - the port city in Alaska which contains almost half the state's population - and anchorage: that state of a ship being anchored somewhere, but Haledjian's persistent mistake is his flawed assumption that everyone knows the correct terminology for everything and routinely uses it in everyday interactions. He idiotically believes that everyone has his own knowledge pool, but had I heard this same thing, I would have assume Anchorage, Alaska was being referred to because most people don't say 'at anchorage', they say 'docked' even if that term is not strictly accurate! Again, for me it was really weak, and such a case would have been thrown out of court were there no other corroborative evidence.

In another case, Haledjian's idiotic incriminating evidence is that no railroad man would have said "twenty minutes after three," but instead would have said, "three-twenty," which is patent bullshit. His second line of devastating evidence is that no resident of San Francisco would ever call it 'Frisco. Again, had this case been tried on the basis of those two lines of 'evidence' it would have been summarily dismissed.

Another case hinges on a guy - who is dying of a stab wound - coming out of the house and telling Haledjian "Water" which shortly convinces him that this guy Scott is the guilty party. His 'reasoning' is that he learned from Scott that this guy was left-handed and consequently had all of his faucets switched so that the hot and cold water come out of the 'wrong' faucets as compared with the standard arrangement. Let's ignore the fact that this person being left-handed offers no rationale for switching faucets and put it down to the guy's eccentricity. What convinces Haledjian of Scott's guilt is that when he rushes into the house to get water (instead of immediately calling for an ambulance) he gets hot water rather than the cold he expected.

Haledjian realizes that Scott must have run the hot water to wash blood off his hands and this is why hot water came out immediately rather than taking time to warm up, and that therefore Scott is the murderer! If that's the case, why didn't the victim say "Scott stabbed me!" instead of offering the asinine cryptic clue 'water' and hoping Haledjian would make the labyrinthine connection? It's horseshit of the same stinking hue that Dan Brown created in the idiotic The Da Vinci Code when he had a dying man running around creating cryptic clues when he could simply have left a note explaining that a mad monk killed him, and asking in the note for Robert Langdon to contact his granddaughter!

So while I thought these would be entertaining, they were overall more annoying than anything. Once in a while there was an interesting or an entertaining one, but those were too few and far between for me to find this a commendable read. Maybe it would make a good bathroom book - you can always use the pages if you run out of toilet tissue! But as for me, I DNF'd it.

Night Broken by Patricia Briggs

Rating: WARTY!

If this novel has "over 29,000 five-star Goodreads ratings" why is it being flogged at a discount in a book flyer? The blurb claims that, "When her werewolf husband’s ex comes back into the picture, Mercy must protect herself — while trying to solve a murder case" Why? I mean by all means protect yourself, but why is it necessary? Is her husband's ex evil? Dangerous? If so why can't she rely on her husband or the police?

And why is she trying to solve a murder case? Is it because the local cops are once again morons as they always are in these private dick novels? If I were a cop I'd resent insulting novels like this one. And if this is a supernatural world, are there not supernatural means to solve it? Or is it insoluable since it's supernatural? LOL!

Oh look! Charlaine Harris apparently said, "I love these books" - well, maybe she did, and maybe she didn't. I don't know and I sure don't trust a book description to get it right. My question is: did she love this particular one? We don't know!

Did she actually read "these books" or does she just like the covers? Is anyone going to ask her? I doubt it. And why the hell should I read something that some author I don't know personally recommends? I may well have read a book of hers, but I don't know her or her tastes. Her recommendation tells me nothing about "these books" if I've never heard of her! If I've read her books and didn't like them, I'm sure as hell not going to buy this one!

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.

A Christmas Cruise Murder by Dawn Brookes

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Alex Lee, this audiobook interested me because I published a cruise ship murder mystery myself some months ago and I was curious to know what another author would do with one. This one with a Christmas theme sounded like it might be fun, but I was wrong! My bad! I could not stand this novel and I ran from it after about five chapters. There were two problems. One was the reading voice of Alex Lee which I did not like at all, but even had the voice been magic in my ears, I still would have given up on this because of the writing style.

This is the first book in a series and I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of series as a general rule, but the first problem here for me is the absurdity of the premise - that a female police constable (later a detective constable and presumably later a sergeant and so on) goes on seven cruises and on every one there is a murder! I'm sorry but no. This is just as stupid as the woman who retreats in disarray to her ancestral home, opens a cupcake shop in this tiny village, and then finds it's the murder capital of the world. No! By far the most common crime on cruise ships is sexual assault, and even that is rare. The truth is that there are 25 times fewer crimes on a cruise ship than in your typcial city - at least as far as an American survey indicated. Maybe Britain is just the opposite....

So this Brit police officer, Rachel is looking forward to this cruise to the Canary Islands with her new fiancé. Her old fiancé is long gone, but evidently makes an appearance in a later book. I guess Rachel's life is just improbably brimming with coincidences. Her plans are scuppered when her new fiancé is called away to Italy to solve a hotel crime. I guess the Carabinieri are completely incompetent.

Another improbable coincidence is that, on the bus journey to the dock at Southampton to get on board, Rachel ends up not only speaking with the murder victim (the ship's Maître D) before he's murdered, but also gets her hands on his wallet which he conveniently leaves behind him on the bus, and which, unless I missed it (I listened to this while driving so my attention wasn't always focused on the story), Rachel never turns in and the Maître D never misses!

Another annoyance was the obsession the author seems to have with people's hair. We always get a hair description no matter how irrelevant it is. To me, unless the person's papeparance is critical to furthering the story it really doesn't matter what they look like and a brief sketch is plenty for me. To go into too much detail or worse, to do a Stephen King and deliver a not-so-potted history of the person's life is an annoyance because it brings the story to a screeching halt for no reason at all. I do not like that kind of writing.

The book description itself tells us what's wrong with this: "Rachel can't resist snooping once she suspects an element of foul play" Snooping. That's the operative word, including breaking into a crime scene with no authorization whatsoever. If the cruise people had asked for Rachel's help, that's one thing, but it's not her jurisdiction. It's the jurisdiction of the Hampshire Constabulary, since the murder took place while the ship was docked and is, as far as I could tell, discovered before the ship has even left British territorial waters.

I thought this might be different from your typical 'cozy mystery', which I avoid like SARS-CoV-2, but no! Even though the main character is a police officer, it turns out that she's still an interfering person who withholds evidence and breaks the law in her selfish and crazed pursuit of a murderer. In fact, one could argue here that so many murders take place around her that she's somehow a trigger for them, and in light of this, ought to be banned from cruise ships altogether. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Death in the English Countryside by Sara Rosett

Rating: WARTY!

This is your standard English country murder story and it baldly states it right there in the title. I'm not a fan of this kind of story, especially not when it's in first person. I read this one only to try and see what was going on in a 'cozy mystery' story just out of sheer curiosity, and I had some issues with it pretty much from the start.

The author seems unable to write anything other than a series and I am no fan of series. At some point, you have to wonder why it is that so many murders occur around the "sleuth" who investigates them! Is she really the guilty party?!. This novel didn't have the word 'sleuth' in the book description, otherwise I would have dismissed it out of hand. I guess now I also have to dismiss it when it has the word 'cozy' in it or when the author is this one.

Talking of whom, she has four of these series out there because one is never far more than enough, and I'll bet every one is really the same and has a weak woman protagonist (and is probably in first person voice). But look on the bright side: if someone who writes so poorly and predictably can get onto a best seller list, then there's hope for all of us! For some three hundred bucks, you can take her "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" course wherein, as judged by this outing, you can learn how to create a limp and clueless female leads who need manly validation by a studly English country guy, and who likes to meddle where she should leave things to the police. You can learn the same thing for free by reading well-plotted and well-written murder mysteries.

Her relationship with Alex (said manly man) in this story was cringe-worthy. She's supposedly a mature business woman yet she behaves like she's thirteen and just as clueless as your average thirteen-year-old, unable to process any of the sensations she gets around Alex. It was amateur, pathetic, and nauseating to read. Oh, and Alex has a bicep. Not biceps, but a bicep. I'm not kidding! You can feel it if you want; one of the female characters did. I guess he had an accident or something and lost the other bicep in that arm.

So this woman - with the highly inappropriate name of Kate Sharp (she's not remotely sharp) - works for a company that scouts locations for movies. Why a US company is being asked to scout English locations is one of the few the real mysteries in this novel. I guess the author, being American herself, has to have that American connection because god forbid a novel should be set elsewhere, or if it is, it should have no Americans in it! Maybe she shares the trump philosophy wherein only US citizens are worth anything and they sure as hell can show those bumbling British cops a few things.

Kate's boss, Kevin originally does the scouting, which constitutes another mystery since the movie he's seeking locations for is yet another remake of a Jane Austen novel (because we sure as hell don't have too many of those now), and Kate is the resident Austen buff, yet Kevin is the one who goes. Anyway, he disappears without word or trace, and Kate is dispatched to find him. He has a history of alcohol abuse so the suspicion is that he's on a bender. Kate is unable to find him until he shows up dead in the river, along with his rental car.

There's no spoiler there - it's a murder mystery after all! It is amusing how the author makes much of how rainy and cold it is in the UK, when it actually really isn't. Of course that's dependent upon when you travel there, but it has cold spells; it has warm spells. It has rainy spells; it has dry spells. It's not foggy all the time either! Has the ever been there?

I have to wonder at the value of the course the author offers. It's not a writing course; it's a plotting course, but when the author doesn't know it's 'downright' and not 'down right' and employs redundant phrases like "see if he'd reply back" one has to wonder. These were not the only issues in this style of writing. I read, "I couldn't remember the last time a man had held open a door for me." What does Kate want? To be a wilting violet? Does she want equality or pampering? We no longer live in an era where men are required to open doors for woman; even Prince William's wife doesn't expect that! Maybe instead of Kate Sharp she should be Kate Uppity?

As to her smarts, I read this: "My fingers itched to get my camera and record the quiet beauty of it, but I'd left it in my room at the inn. Apparently Ms Sharp has never heard of a cell phone camera.... Equally pertinent is this one:

“Hmm, I should have emphasized that,” Alex murmured. “Where is that business card?”
“I left the one Quimby gave me in my room. Come on, I’ll get it for you.”

Kate has Quimby's number in her phone since she called him. She could have just got it from there, but of course she has to get Alex to her room so she can sit with their thighs touching on the bed. Pathetic.

A woman who truly worked in the scouting location business would live on her phone. It would be second-nature to go to it without a moment's thought, yet Kate is completely inept at using her phone. It's just not authentic. And this is written by someone who would charge you good money to teach you how to plot?! It's obvious from halfway through the novel who the guilty party is (chercher la femme pétulante) - and I'm typically not that good at spotting the perp. The red herring is obvious too, and not remotely convincing.

This book was sad and silly, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Her Perfect Life by Rebecca Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I made it about a third of the way through this book before I gave up on it. The story is about a wealthy author who apparently commits suicide on a beach right as her latest novel is hitting the public eye. It's also about her sister who lives a rather more impoverished life, apparently receiving no assistance from her rich sister, and who gets an unexpected call from her distraught brother-in-law. I immediately suspected that guy rather than suicide, but since I didn't finish this novel, I have no idea if I'm right.

Eileen flies to her sister's home, and that's where I gave up on it. The story did nothing to move me at all. In fact it felt like a depressing and dreary read, but two things really turned me off it. The first was the screeching halt to which the story was brought to by flashbacks. I cannot stand flashbacks. I can't think of a better way to annoy your reader than interrupt what had begun as an interesting story to explore tedious family history. When I read a story I want to get on with the story. I do not want to be constantly and irritatingly interrupted by the author forcing me to go back in time, giving me whiplash by suddenly - in Chapter three, for example, forcing me back two years ago. Tell the story now for goodness sake!

Neither did it help by the tennis-play chapters - now we're with Eileen, Now we're with Simon. No, it's back to Eileen. Wait a sec! Now Simon has it. Slap! Look left. Slap! Look right! Sorry, but no. No. NO! I was initially attracted and intrigued by the idea of Eileen reading Clare's latest novel and finding clues in the writing as to what happened, but he author seemed defiantly intent upon putting me off that story altogether by screwing around instead of getting on with it. The more I read, the less I felt that the payoff would be worth the work of reading this, and work it was.

One of the most obnoxious parts of the book was that I once again had to read a female author describing a woman and putting beauty first in the list, like no woman has any higher calling or more important trait than being beautiful. I have seen this time and time again in reading books by female authors and I find it sickening that they cannot value their fellow women - not even fictional ones - for anything apart from beauty first.

I read, at only 6% in, "Clare Collins was beautiful...." Yes, it went on to describe other qualities, but beauty was always foremost. 28% in: "...beautiful, talented, and simply awe-inspiring sister...." Yep. Beauty first. Again. How beastly. 37% in "...her beautiful face...." 40% in: "...her beautiful surface...." 41% in: "Clare was beautiful...." Oh wait! at 51% in we get a change! Clare is "...vivacious and..." on no! "Vivacious and beautiful...." There it goes again. 61%: "...beautiful and talented...." It was tediously repetitive.

This is tiresome, obnoxious, and awful writing. People who write about women like this are a part of the problem and I cannot commend a book that persistently devalues women to a skin depth and little more. The book description has it that this is "a page-turning debut" but for me it was a stomach-turning one, and a cover-closing one so I could move on to the next read on my list which hopefully will feature characters who are not valued only for skin which is 'bright and clear' which is what the name Clare means. I can't commend this based on the layout of the book, the demeaning of a female character, and the content of the third of it that I managed to stomach.

Death in a Hansom Cab by Kerry Segrave

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
Having missed being at the track on the Monday and Tuesday, he last sighting was on the Sunday when he was spotted in a restaurant with Randolph" - His last sighting? The last sighting?
"While her performances in Floradora do no seem to have garnered any critical reviews" - do not
"Them he grew neglectful, despite her protests" - then he grew
"continued her statement by stated she first met" by stating / by relating?
"and no bullet hold in the coat pocket" hole? This is a quote, so it may be original, but there was no attempt by the author to clarify.
"left lung and lodged in the fourth vertebrae." - vertebrae is a plural. The word should have been vertebra.
"this account at least correctly the false reports" - corrected?
"Soon Mrs. Young head abut the affair." - heard about?
"Young "wrecker" his home" - wrecked?
"and give it out that she was one of the members of the Floradora chorus but had tired on the stage." - gave it, tired of?
"Patterson knew abut the Europe trip and possible separation" - about
"reported that Nan had no eaten" - not eaten
"Throughout the period of Nan's incarceration it was regularly noted, from time to time" - regularly or from time to time? It can't be both!
"and I am amazed that the man should pursue such a coarse." - course - again this is quoted speech with no confirmation of original
"before thee Smiths finally resurfaced" - the Smiths.
"Smith had said to her; "You will have to do it," ad she answered; "I won't." - and she answered
"where the water from a simple faucet dripped into a wooden paid." - pail?
"Another long article abut Patterson appeared" - again with about
"Over four month in Washington Patterson was said" - four months
"Nan responded to rumors that he husband Leon was going to divorce here by saying such speculation was untrue." - one sentence, two errors, both of which should read 'her'
"That a report surfaced from Cincinnati that Nan had been named as corespondent" - then a report, and correspondent is misspelled.

The impression I got from this author is that she has access to a bunch of newspaper archives from a period of time from around 1850 to around 1950 and she scours them for book ideas. She's written about drive-in theaters, vending machines, shoplifting, police women, and many other topics. It felt like at some point she came across this death in perusing the papers, and decided to write about it. The problem with this particular book was that there were so many errors (I list a score of them above) and so much repetition in it that despite my initial interest in the curious story and my bias in favor of reading it, it quickly became rather tedious to read at times.

Some of this repetition was due to poor editing. For example, I read:

"Whenever Miss Patterson disapproves of a talesman who is satisfactory to both counsel [each side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
side], her lawyers promptly reject the man."
year-old retired merchant.

Clearly this is poor editing, and the book would have been immeasurably better if it had a spell-checker and a grammar check run on it. Most of the errors I report above would have bene caught by such a precaution. It's really a lot to ask a reviewer to approve a book when it's in such a sloppy condition.

Another instance is where I read,

third point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away point was that on the afternoon of June 3 Young took a pistol away caliber revolver; fifth point

There is duplicated text here, and the fourth point is missing completely!

Some of the text was just plan rambling:

Nan Patterson was called to the bar for once again, to be tried for murder in the first degree, for the third time.

It's tautologous to use 'once again' and 'for the third time' - only one of these is needed. Later I read:

Forty-two of the 60 peremptory challenges allowed to both sides were used (30 allowed each side) with the defense using 24 of its peremptory challenges while the prosecution used 18 of its challenges.

This is just repetitively rambling, as is this:

Another over-the-top exaggeration about Nan and her reaction in court supposed came on April 24 when the defendant was supposedly overcome

The basic story is that in early June 1904, a man by the name of Frank Thomas "Caesar" Young was riding in a hansom cab with his lover, an actor by the name of Anne Elizabeth "Nan" Patterson. Young was married and supposedly on his way to board the Germanic, a White Star Lines cruise ship heading for Europe. Germanic was a precursor of the Titanic which would be built starting just five years later.

The ship was supposed to depart at 9:30 am, so the author says, but another account I read indicated 9 pm. The author never addresses any question of whether it was a morning departure or an evening departure and goes with the morning. I take her word for it since it seems that such ships would tend to leave in the morning or mid-afternoon, not at night.

One thing that is certain is that Young was not with his wife on the dock. Instead, at 7:30, he called Nan who was staying with her sister and her brother-in-law at a hotel. He picked her up in the cab at Columbus Circle around 8:00. The plan, she understood, was to travel together to within a block or two of the ship, and then drop her off. Young's wife knew of the affair, and since she controlled the purse strings, she was ordering Young away from Patterson. How that thing with the purse strings happened goes unexplained, since Young was the one with the fortune, but his wife was insisting on this trip to try and break up her husband from his mistress.

The cab traveled alarmingly slowly apparently, because according to this narrative, Young insisted they stop on two different occasions to get a drink at a bar, and on a third occasion to buy a straw boater! This conflicts with an earlier account in the book, in which the author tells us the cabbie claims nothing untoward happened on the journey until the shooting. It's quite a ride from the Paul Hotel where she was staying, down to the pier from which the ship would depart. How he hoped to board in time is a mystery, but the author never addresses this. Perhaps he had no intention of boarding.

The incident occurred around nine, at a time when you would think the ship would have pulled up the boarding gangways and be making ready to depart, but there's no word about what Mrs Young was doing at this time. The author, in her focus on Patterson seems completely uncaring about what was happening with Mrs Young. The cabbie heard a muffled shot, and it was discovered that Young was dead, shot in a way that made it look like suicide was not an easy explanation, although suicide is how the case was treated initially, and which partially explains why forensic evidence was so poorly attended to.

Later, Patterson was arrested, and despite three trials over the next eleven months, the prosecution was unable to get a conviction, and Patterson was let go, but not acquitted. She was not tried again, and ended up remarrying the man she had left for Young, although that guy apparently took ill and died, and Patterson seemed to show no interest in his welfare. The author glosses over this in her laser focus on this supposedly wronged woman, who later married again, and then fell into obscurity and likely died a pauper's death.

The author is right in that Patterson was hounded and smeared by the newspapers none of which thought an actor could possibly be a person of decent or moral character. The author makes a big deal throughout the story of calling out various assertions about Patterson as lies, but without offering corroboration as to how these lies were exposed. For example, I would read, "or so the account would have its readers believe. It was a lie." There is no evidence or argument offered to explain why it was a lie; we're simply expected to take the author's word for it.

This sort of bland assumption appears often. For example, at one point, I read this:

"Certainly no account ever appeared anywhere else about a constantly raucous and unruly crowd of spectators. Thus the above story was another fabrication and perhaps was published only to display the not so subtle misogyny of the newspaper."

There really is no ground whatsoever for making such an assumption! First of all, the author herself does report other instances where the crowd was unruly, but she makes no real distinction between reports of unruliness inside, versus outside the courtroom, thereby confusing things.

One glaring example of biased reporting is the disappearance of Patterson's sister and her husband for several months. The author makes much of how the police on the one had are supposedly tailing them, but on the other do not seem to be able to arrest them, but she makes no inquiry whatsoever into why the sister of a woman accused of murder would disappear, together with her husband right when Patterson is going to trial - nor why they are gone for so long.

To me, this is highly suspicious because it relates to the question of a man and a woman purchasing a revolver in New York City which was likely the one discharged in the cab. The author simply assumes, with little evidence, that it was Young's gun. She never once asks why, when Patterson is in dire trouble, her sister, with whom she'd been living, was nowhere to be found. Not only is that suspicious in and of itself, it's also suspicious as to why the author fails to ask hard and obvious questions about this bizarre behavior on their part.

It's this bias and the lack of any sort of gray-shading that spoils the value of the reporting here. The repetitions and the score or more of grammatical and spelling errors further detract from the story, taking attention from the woman who the author would like to gently place at the center of this story and focusing it instead on the problems with the book. In view of all of this, I cannot in good faith commend this as a worthy read.

I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

Rating: WARTY!

I believe I saw the Armand Assante movie based on this novel, and evidently I found it unmemorable. I started reading the novel and it was so bad that I could not get into it at all. I know it's a novel of its time (1947), but seriously? Frank Morrison Spillane was working in a department store and he got his start in writing through concocting super hero stories for the comic book industry right before Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was his military experiences that hard-boiled him, but Mike Hammer's debut was penned in just 19 days when Spillane was looking to make some money to buy a nice house.

I think that two-week gestation shows in the writing, but it's the Trumpian treatment of women which bothers me. "She had million-dollar legs, that girl, and she didn't mind showing them off...[she] wore tight-fitting dresses that made me think of the curves in the Pennsylvania Highway..." Hammer leaves his girlfriend at a party, going off into the woods outside to have sex and then returns. Spillane's books are racist, homophobic and misogynistic. I can't commend this one and I'm definitely done with this author.

The Deep End by Julie Mulhern

Rating: WARTY!

This story was first person, a voice I typically detest, but even so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a major problem immediately and gave up on it at once, not wanting to tempt fate and read on in the faint hope it would improve. The story began with the main character strolling out to the backyard pool for a morning swim, and somehow she fails to notice a dead body in the water until she dives in and swims right into it? Was she blind? Did she keep her eyes closed until she dived into the water? It was, quite simply, bad writing and if I start out by reading that in the first few paragraphs I'm sure-as-hell not going to waste my time reading on under the delusion that it will get better. Certainly not in first person I'm not! I can't commend this one, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by Marion Chesney Gibbons aka MC Beaton

Rating: WARTY!

I bought this book - which is part of a series about a British amateur detective named Agatha Raisin - based on my love of the British TV series derived from it. Normally I would not give a novel like this or a series like this the time of day and I was interested only because the TV show was so enjoyable. Sadly, the book isn't quite the same.

We expect this. You can't translate a book, no matter how loved it is, directly into a screen format without losing things and changing things, and even adding things, but the discrepancy between the delightfully lush grape of a TV detective and the sad Raisin of the book was quite startling. The Agatha of the TV show was, unfortunately, but predictably younger (by a decade) and much more pleasant. The Agatha of the novel is rather obnoxious at times. There's no reason at all why an actor of similar age could not have been hired, but TV and movies favor youth (or the appearance of it) over anything else, it seems.

I had what I call my 'robot reader' read this ebook to me. It's actually Apple's Voice Over technology, and it does a pretty decent job when you figure out how to use it wisely (the trick is never to turn it on until you are actually in the ebook, and to turn it off before you exit the ebook!), but this thing has no idea of a 'quiche' so it gets egg on its face! Naturally that word was used effusively, since someone died after eating one, but the robot reader pronounces it like it rhymes with swish, and like the word begins with 'kw'. It amused the hell out of me every time I heard it. We take our joys in life where we can, right? Otherwise it would be miserable and we'd probably all end-up being like the Agatha of the book instead of the Agatha of the TV series.

Anyways, Agatha has retired from her job running a PR firm in London, and moved to a small village named Carsley in the English Cotswolds region. Of course it's one of those tiny places where, ridiculously, the murder rate rivals Detroit or some major city. It's absurd, yes, and this is only one reason I'd never follow a series like this.

So the village has a quiche competition. Agatha cheats and buys a quiche at a store out of town and enters it as her own creation. She's miffed when she doesn't win and considers the contest rigged. She tells the organizer she doesn't want her quiche and requests they throw it away, but the organizer of the contest - the guy she doesn't like - takes it home and dies of poisoning after eating a piece. Naturally, she's a suspect and so gets dragged into the investigation.

The story kept going off at irrelevant tangents and was consequently boring, plus I didn't like Agatha at all. I gave up on it before I'd listened to very much and cannot commend it as a worthy read. I'm done with this series, and with this author.

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.