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Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2393 KP) rated Staging is Murder in Books

May 1, 2019

Starting a New Business is Murder

Laura Bishop is just getting her home staging business off the ground, and she is thrilled to land Victoria Denton as her first client. Victoria can make her reputation in their small Pennsylvania town. Unfortunately, Victoria also has a reputation for being hard to work with, and Laura is finding that all too true. Working late one night, Laura is shocked to find Victoria’s dead body. When the police arrest Laura’s assistant, she decides she needs to look into the crime to find out what really happened. But can she do it?

Since this is the first in a new series, we get to meet quite a few new characters here. I enjoyed Laura and her friends, although they do have a little room to grow as the series progresses. The plot starts off strong, but bogs down a bit as Laura struggles to figure out how to start her investigation. Not that I can say much since I identify with her struggle. Once she gets moving, thanks in part to some blunt questions from her friends (again, too much like me), the story picks up and I was fully on board. The climax was creative and answered all our questions. Laura is a mystery fan herself, and I enjoyed her comparing herself to the main characters in the books she’s read. Each chapter starts with tips on staging your home, and they made me very thankful that I am not planning on selling my condo any time soon due to all the work involved. I’ll just enjoy reading about Laura’s efforts to stage houses and solve mysteries.

Kudos

Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated Evil Genius in TV

Jun 26, 2018 (Updated Jun 27, 2018)

Evil Genius

2018 | Documentary

7.5

(24 Ratings)

TV Show Rating

Fascinating case (0 more)

Misses out some key information (0 more)

Evil? Most definitely. Genius? More questionable.

Evil Genius is a 4 part documentary series on Netflix created by Trey Borzillieri and Barbara Schroeder. It covers the 2003 Pizza Bomber Bank Heist that took place in Erie, Pennsylvania, a bizarre case that still has many unanswered questions years later.

The documentary opens very strongly, launching you right into the action and the entire first episode is full of WTF moments. Unfortunately after this, the doc slows right down, from the start of episode 2 right up until the last 15 minutes or so of ep4, which thankfully picks up for a decent revelation that round off the show. Due to the doc only being 4 episodes, it meant that it didn't drag on too much like Making A Murderer did, but it also meant that each episode felt a bit uneven, crammed in places and slow in others.

One major disappointment for me was the fact they never spoke to anyone that was actually working in the bank the day that Brian Wells walked in wearing a collar bomb and robbed it. I felt like this was a huge insight that could have answered lots of questions and was totally missed by the filmmakers.

I sort of felt that they instead spent too much time on Marjory Dhiel-Armstrong and her co-conspirators who were most likely the ones that put the collar on Brian and got him to rob the bank. Sure, their weird back stories are kinda interesting, but the most important part of this story is what happened in and outside of the PNC bank in Erie that day.

Kudos

Benedick Lewis (3001 KP) rated Origin in Books

Jul 13, 2018

Origin

Dan Brown | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry

7.3

(21 Ratings)

Book Rating

Short chapters (0 more)

Research appears to have been done on Wikipedia (1 more)

Although chapters are short, nothing happens

Slow and poorly written...that’s just the title

I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. It was a book of the time and it felt like a blockbuster, which is what it eventually became. I then read Digital Fortess and Deception Point (not part of the Robert Langdon mythology) and they did the job as well. I felt, yeah, alright, that was worth two pounds (GBP).
Then I didn’t touch Dan Brown again. Simply because I had other things to read and the premises weren’t that interesting - until Origin, which looked like it would be as shattering as the Da Vinci Code was. What I forgotten was I got older and more educated. Origin promises answers to two questions: where did we come from? Where are we going? These questions are repeated constantly and you start to get Rednex’s Cotton Eye Joe in your head. For about 100 pages the build up is admittedly incredible but at the same time you think you know what is going to happen because there are 300 plus pages left. I won’t spoil anything and I advise you not to read the blurb because that does 25% of the book for you. From then on, apparently it is a race against time but you never truly feel anything is at stake. When the answers do come, you feel like ‘oh, right’ as if someone told you a fact you didn’t know but not really going to remember. And, in summary, Origin is so badly written that you won’t remember it.