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Midge (525 KP) rated Wedding Wipeout in Books

Dec 10, 2018

Wedding Wipeout

Jacob Appel | 2018 | Humor & Comedy, Mystery

8.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

A very enjoyable, humorous and refreshing mystery. (0 more)

Need a high level of concentration at the start as you are introduced to many of the characters very quickly. (0 more)

A Brilliant and Witty Mystery!

I really enjoyed Wedding Wipeout far more than I was expecting to. The story-line is brilliant and the mystery is so good that you want to keep on reading.

Rabbi Kappelmacher is planning to retire and is training his assistant, Rabbi Steinmetz, to follow in his footsteps, however, things get interesting when a visitor arrives. Former assistant Rabbi, Marshall Green, is now a lawyer with a case to solve.

One of his firm’s clients has died under suspicious circumstances. An elderly woman, Florence Eisenstein had just married the man she had been dating for the last several months, Alfred Shingle. The morning after her wedding, she is found dead in her bed.

She and her sister, Lorraine, were to be the heirs to their father’s egg cream fortune. Their father’s will, however, stipulated that if either of them married her allowance would cease and the proceeds would immediately pass to the other sister. So why, after so many years of unmarried contentment, did Florence decide to marry and also announce to her family that she had found a way to break the will? A will that, as far as Green was aware, was unbreakable. And why did she say that she was disinheriting her nephew, with whom she was on good terms?

Though Wedding Wipeout appears to be a typical mystery novel and is rather reminiscent of Agatha Christies's Poirot, it's actually quite a refreshing take on the mystery genre. Rabbi Kappelmacher and his sidekick, Rabbi Steinmetz have a very entertaining partnership whilst visiting with suspects and eyewitnesses. I particularly liked the wit and dry humour that was evident throughout the book, although I think that some of the humour and certainly some of the references, may have been lost on me, not being Jewish.

Green believes Florence may have been murdered, even though her own doctor ruled it an accidental death. Using his wit and rabbinic reasoning, Kappelmacher unravels all of the misleading information, red herrings and lies to reveal the truth, whilst Steinmetz tries to keep pace with him.

Wedding Wipeout was a wonderful read. I greatly look forward to reading more books by Jacob M Appel.

Thanks to LibraryThing and the author for a copy of Wedding Wipeout, via Members Giveaway.

Kudos

A Druze Warlord at the Court of the Medici

T.J. Gorton

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Fakhr ad-Din Ma'n was a small man with outsize ambitions, and Renaissance Emir tells his story, a...

Awix (3310 KP) rated Fighting with My Family (2019) in Movies

Feb 28, 2019

Fighting with My Family (2019)

2019 | Biography, Comedy, Drama

7.9

(42 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Heavily fictionalised women's-entertainment-wrestling biopic is kept very watchable by solid if familiar structure and a clutch of strong performances. Not really the pure comedy that the trailer suggests it may be; the more serious strands of the plot are surprisingly effective - not really the Dwayne Johnson movie that the publicity material also implies, as a high percentage of his on-screen contribution is in the trailer.

Works pretty well as a sports movie, hitting all the right beats; tries to fudge the fact that entertainment-wrestling isn't strictly speaking sport (i.e., the results of the matches are scripted), not especially successfully. Fun to watch anyway; Florence Pugh carries the movie effortlessly and doesn't even need to go into high gear to do so.

Kudos

Erika (17788 KP) rated The Little Drummer Girl in TV

Dec 9, 2018

When it was announced that Little Drummer Girl was going to be adapted, directed by Park Chan-Wook, starring Alexander Skarsgård, I was so completely excited. Park Chan-Wook's Stoker is one of my favorite films, and Skarsgård is always good.
I feel like there was a high bar set by The Night Manager, another Le Carre adaptation, and this fell way below it. Every few minutes, my friend and I compared them... Little Drummer Girl was just boring. I feel like they could have easily updated it, since the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still alive and well.
Skarsgård essentially played the same character as when he lost his memory as Eric in True Blood. I like Florence Pugh, but her character was just flat for me.

Kudos

Lyndsey Gollogly (2893 KP) rated Hidden Fire (Elemental Mysteries #1) in Books

Apr 13, 2020

A phone call from an old friend sets Dr. Giovanni Vecchio back on the path of a mysterious manuscript he's hunted for over five hundred years. He never expected a young student librarian could be the key to unlock its secrets, nor could he have predicted the danger she would attract.

Now he and Beatrice De Novo follow a twisted maze that leads from the archives of a university library, though the fires of Renaissance Florence, and toward a confrontation hundreds of years in the making.

I really enjoyed reading this! Loved the discovery of witches vibe I got. The characters are brilliant I loved them all.it flowed easy enough and I didn't want to put it down. Look forward to book 2.