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Review: Murder Most Persuasive by Tracy Kiely

15 Sep

Murder Most PersuasiveMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was light and fun!

Summary via Goodreads:

After the death of Elizabeth Parker’s great-uncle Martin Reynolds, the family’s house in the picturesque Maryland town of St. Michaels is sold. When the new owners dig up the pool, they find the body of the man thought to have run off eight years earlier after embezzling over a million dollars from the family business.

This grisly discovery not only unearths old questions about what really happened to the stolen money, but it brings Detective Joe Muldoon back into the family’s lives. Eight years earlier, Elizabeth’s cousin Ann reluctantly broke off her relationship with Joe due to family pressure. Ann always regretted that decision and now fears that it is too late for her and Joe–especially after she becomes the main suspect.

In Murder Most Persuasive, a clever and entertaining story with echoes of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Elizabeth tries to not only match wits against a killer who’s had an eight year head-start, but to also try her hand at matchmaking.

I admit, Persuasion isn’t my favorite Jane Austen novel, and listening to it while reading Murder Most Persuasive confirmed that. Still, I’m glad I revisited it, because I would have missed most of the Austen references in this book, and then I would have missed out on much of the fun.

I haven’t read any of the previous books in the Elizabeth Parker series, but that didn’t present any problems here.

The characters are lively and well-drawn. I suspect there is a little more depth if you watch them from book to book, but I enjoyed them as presented. I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth, as she struggled with a job she didn’t love and a sister she loved but didn’t always like (with good reason!).

The mystery was reasonably complex and well presented. I figured out the murderer fairly early on, but there really was some luck involved in that guess, and I did have my doubts as the story moved along.

And (as I mentioned above) the Austen references were lots of fun! The book never tries to be a retelling of Persuasion, so there isn’t any worry about getting the details wrong. It simply is a story with amusing references and parallels.

Mystery loving Austen fans should check out this series.

Kaye Publicity sent me a copy of this Murder Most Persuasive for review.  Thank you!

 

 
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Posted by on September 15, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Goodie One Shoes by Roz Siegel

07 Sep

My rating:3.5 stars

Overall I enjoyed the story and the characters in this unusual mystery.

Summary via GoodieOneShoes.com:

A Jimmy Choo Sandal. A Manolo Blahnik mule; a Sergio Rossi slide, a Prada sliver-heeled boot. As magic as Cinderella’s glass slipper. Even when they don’t fit, they can determine your life—or end it. Emily knows these things because she owns a discount shoe store on the colorful Upper West Side of Manhattan—Emily’s Place a neighborhood hangout for shoe lovers, where customers could find a sympathetic ear, a hot cup of coffee and the perfect shoe. Unfortunately, someone has decided that a sexy stiletto-heeled shoe is an excellent murder weapon. A member of the Emily’s Place “family”—the staff of women who run the store and love the shoes in it—is murdered with a red Jimmy Choo high-heeled shoe—sharp as an ice pick, the spiked heel is embedded in her head. Emily is still reeling from the shock of her friend’s murder when a bag is shoved through her mail slot containing the mate to the shoe that was the murder weapon. Emily realizes that her store and everyone connected to it is a target and that a psycho killer is stalking them all. In fact the killer seems to particularly want Emily to suffer. She insists on working with the detective assigned to the case, Paul Murphy to find the killer—and she will do whatever it takes. It’s personal.

I expected chick lit meets mystery, and certainly aspects of both were present in the book. Overall, it was heavier on the mystery and lighter on the chick lit. In fact, I’d call this more of a big city cozy!

Emily was a much more mature (in all senses of the word) adult than is usually implied by the term “chick”, which I appreciated.  This isn’t unusual for the lead character in a cozy. The community around her shoe store was a very big city crowd, but still had the feeling of the “everybody knows each other” environment in a cozy mystery. It was a bit grittier than a cozy, but that fit with the setting, and it worked for me.

I liked Emily, and I enjoyed the mystery component, but I did have some issues with the book– not major ones, luckily. The secondary characters were interesting, but felt a bit forced at times. The writing felt a bit clunky at times, and I didn’t get as immersed in the story as I would have liked and expected.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and would pick up another book by this author.

I received a copy of this book free for review purposes.

 
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Posted by on September 7, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Deed to Death by D. B. Henson

17 Aug

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not a bad mystery, but I found the writing a bit rough. It wasn’t terrible, but it could have been better.

Summary via Goodreads.com:

AT TWENTY-NINE, TONI MATTHEWS IS ON THE CUSP OF HAVING IT ALL—a successful career as one of the top real estate agents in Nashville, great friends, and the partner and family she’d always longed for in her fiancé, architect Scott Chadwick.

But just days before their planned nuptials, Scott plummets to his death at one of his construction sites and Toni is forced to bury her fiancé on their wedding day. Now living all alone in their new, custom-made dream house, dealing with her loss becomes even harder when the police rule his death a suicide. Yet Toni refuses to believe that it could be anything other than a tragic accident.

When she learns that Scott’s estranged brother, Brian, is contesting the will, threatening to take away her home, Toni starts to suspect that it may not have been a mere accident but something more sinister. Without the cooperation of the police, and in spite of her friends’ growing concern that she’s in denial and not dealing with her grief, Toni begins investigating on her own. As she crisscrosses Nashville on a mission to prove to herself and the world that Scott wouldn’t try to escape this life, Toni can’t shake the sinking feeling that something is off, that she’s being followed—and that her search for truth may have deadly consequences.

The plot itself was well done– lots and lots of twists and turns, so that neither the reader nor Toni were ever quite sure where things stood. This was by far the strength of the book, and if that’s why you read mysteries, check this one out.

My biggest problem with Deed to Death was related to all of the twists and turns of the plot. I never felt I got to know any of the secondary characters, because there was always something coming between Toni and even her best friends. The situation kept changing, and Toni was once again on her own.

With all of that happening, I should have felt I knew Toni well, but I didn’t. Her character felt flat, and without the excuse of the twists and turns interfering with my perceptions of her.  The outline of her character was interesting, but never felt fully filled in.

And this takes me to the writing. I don’t read for the writing, but the writing has to deliver the story and the characters. While this isn’t the kind of writing that interfered with the story, it also never really delivered the kind of flow that would sweep me into the world of the book.

In the end, I liked the book, but not as much as I’d hoped.

I received Deed To Death from Simon & Schuster for review.  Thank you for this opportunity.

 
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Posted by on August 17, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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