Tag Archives: Book Review

Review | May Day, by Jess Lourey

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I love murder mysteries, small town settings, and romantic comedies, so I went into this expecting to absolutely fall in love with May Day, the first in the Murder by Month Romcom Mystery series by Jess Lourey. Bonus: the heroine Mira is a librarian, her love interest Jeff is an archaeologist, and Mira has not one, but two, adorable pets: a dog and a cat. What’s not to love?

Well, first I should say that I did enjoy the mystery overall. I love the small town silliness that just demands we suspend disbelief: Mira walks into town and immediately gets jobs as librarian and reporter with barely even an interview, and okay, we’ll take it because why not? I also found the mini-romance with Jeff cute, and love that what started as a fairly light-hearted meet-cute led to the discovery that he had much more of a connection to the town than Mira realized. Too bad he had to be the main murder victim, but I did appreciate the author explaining that she was new to the genre when she wrote this and wouldn’t kill off the love interest so cavalierly in future.

The mystery itself was also nice and twisty. I totally didn’t guess the big reveal, but in hindsight, it seemed more obvious than I’d expected, so kudos to the author for keeping me in the dark. I also thought the author did a good job in explaining the killer’s motive. And thinking of the series beyond this book, I thought the backstory about Mira’s father being a convicted murderer gave her an interesting edge as a series heroine. It didn’t really factor much into how she solved this mystery, but the seeds have been planted for Lourey to explore that interesting tidbit more in future instalments.

My one big snag–and granted, this is more about me than the novel–is that for a story that hit so. many of my sweet spots and I was so eager to love, instead it was…just okay. I don’t know if future instalments got more interesting, but this one just felt like the author cobbled together a whole bunch of awesome ingredients, yet ended up with a rather bland stew. It was filling enough, sure, but not quite something that hooked me in and make me keep wanting more. And considering how poised I was to fall in love with this book, that was a letdown.

I also didn’t quite fall in love with Mira herself as the series lead. She says and does things that I think are supposed to be funny, but often just comes off mean or insensitive. For example, she describes older adults as “wrinkled ornaments” and is shocked to discover some of them lead active lives. For an adult approaching 30, a milestone age that can get people starting to reflect on their own mortality, her attitudes towards elderly folks feel pretty mean-spirited.

Then there’s a minor subplot about her friend being pushy about setting Mira up with a professor. Yes, the friend overstepped, and yes, Mira was very clear with the friend that she had no interest in dating after her most recent lover was murdered. But then, in letting the guy down, Mira allows a misunderstanding to happen, and the whole thing is played presumably for comedy, but is actually rather cruel considering the impact Mira’s actions are likely to have on the man.

Overall, it’s not a bad book. The mystery was pretty solid, and the characters had just enough interesting tidbits to keep them from being flat. There are also seeds being planted for a potential romance with one character, and a lasting frenemy-ship with another, and possibly the series will pick up once those get on more solid ground. But for now, this was just okay.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Ltd for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | A Very Bad Thing, by J.T. Ellison

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Oh, wow! Talk about a propulsive page-turner!

J.T. Ellison’s A Very Bad Thing is a pretty hefty book, almost 500 pages thick. I picked it up to be my commuting and lunch break read for the week. Except once I started reading, I didn’t want to stop. I devoured the book over two days, and the only reason it even lasted that long was that I’d started it in the evening, and no matter how much my mind wanted to keep going, my body was more than ready for bed, thank you very much.

Best-selling author Columbia Jones is on a book tour to promote her latest novel and its upcoming movie adaptation. Her books are so popular that Spielberg bought the movie rights to this book even before Columbia finished writing it–now that’s a flex!

Except during the final stop on the tour, Columbia sees someone in the audience who seems to cause her distress. She faints on-stage, and the next morning, is found dead in a pool of blood in her hotel room. I’ll pause here to give the author due kudos: the description of Columbia’s body immediately made me think she was stabbed, but the death actually came about via a different method, one that I believe Agatha Christie herself would have approved of. (Not a spoiler; we learn this fairly early after the death.)

Within the periphery of this event are four characters whose perspectives we’ll follow throughout the rest of the story: Darian, Columbia’s daughter, manager, and sometime collaborator; Riley, the reporter Columbia has selected to write a feature article on the book tour; Kira, a Columbia Jones super-fan whose husband surprised her with tickets to the book tour’s VIP experience, a meet-and-greet with Columbia herself; and Detective Sutcliffe, the cop assigned to the case.

We also learn the Columbia has a stalker, someone who harasses her online from multiple accounts, their messages always beginning with the question, “Do You Remember?”

The secrets haunting Columbia from her past are revealed in a fairly steady stream, and long before the official reveal, it’s not too difficult to fill in most of the blanks. The mystery kept under wraps for much longer is who Columbia’s killer is and why they killed her. More urgently, why does this person now seem to be targeting Riley? Those questions kept me reading long into the night, and had me racing to finish this book even when I knew I had other stuff I needed to do that day.

The ending is frustrating, but I mean that in the best way possible. Because the intensity of my response proves that Ellison has set out to do what she intended: hook me into this thriller and never let me go. I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about the big reveal, only that it made sense to me.

I can also imagine more objective critics calling the climax rushed; given how long it took other reveals to happen, the big set piece in the end does seem rather brief. However, I’ll also admit that it worked for me. I wanted to see how things turned out, darn it! My greedy hands couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, so on a purely visceral level, I was actually glad the climax played out as quickly as it did.

Overall, this is a fantastic read. I’ve read some other good page-turners recently, but this stands head and shoulders above them all. It was unputdownable, plain and simple.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Ltd for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Rose Arbor, by Rhys Bowen

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The Rose Arbor is a captivating and highly engrossing historical fiction/mystery. Rhys Bowen does a great job in immersing you in a different time and place with her prose. I was fully invested in the characters and their journeys, and I actually enjoyed my commutes to and from work because I got to delve into this story again and again.

In 1943, the residents of a small English village named Tydeham were asked to evacuate, so that the military could use their village for wartime exercises. The evacuation was rather frantic; in most cases, people didn’t want to leave their homes. There’s a beautifully heart-breaking moment where a woman insists on having a final cup of tea in her own kitchen before she has to get on the van to leave, and her husband tells her they unfortunately don’t have the time. In all the hubbub, three young girls end up missing, and years later, only one of their bodies has been found.

Flash forward to 1968. Liz Houghton hates her job as an obituary writer for a London newspaper, so when her roommate, Marisa, a police officer, mentions travelling to Dorset to pursue a lead about a young girl’s disappearance, Liz jumps at the chance for a more interesting story. While in Dorset, Liz finds herself drawn to the nearby village of Tydeham. Even though her father insists they’ve never lived there, and Liz would only have been two when the village was evacuated for the war, something about the village seems familiar, and a hunch leads to the discovery of a body behind an old manor house. It isn’t one of the missing girls, but rather the skeleton of a young woman.

Whose body is it? How did Liz know it was there? How, if ever, is it connected to the missing young girls, both from the 1940s and from the present day? Bowen packs her narrative with lots of mysteries, and somehow manages to make all the disparate threads come together by the end.

However, the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. More than the mystery of how Liz is connected to the village of Tydeham, it was her relationships that intrigued me. I was drawn in by the romance developing between her and James, the young man whose family owned the manor where the body was found, and I thought James’ father was charming. Liz’s mother had advanced dementia, and in the few scenes she appeared, Liz’s love for her and sorrow for her current condition really shone through. And Liz’s brigadier father was just shady from the get-go; the way he was portrayed on the page, I imagined far worse secrets than what was eventually revealed.

Adding an extra layer is the stories, mostly lost, of the people of Tydeham. The book starts with the residents of this town reacting to the news that they would have to evacuate, and as much as I got pulled in by the story of Liz in 1968, I also couldn’t help wishing that we’d gotten to spend more time in Tydeham in the 1940s. By the end of the novel, much of the village’s role was reduced to providing plot points for the central mystery, and while I can see the benefit in terms of keeping the storytelling tight, I also couldn’t help but feel the sense of loss that Liz tried to capture in her obituary for the town. Those people mattered, and while it’s certainly realistic that within the context of Liz’s story, so many of these minor characters’ stories would have been lost to time, Bowen has managed to make us care enough to wish this weren’t so.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Limited for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.