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SMARTIFY: Scan & Discover art

Art & Design, Education and Reference

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App

– Scan the art, uncover the story BBC Arts Editor, Will Gompertz: "Smartify is the most elegant,...

Stars Beneath Our Feet

David Barclay Moore

8.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

A boy tries to steer a safe path through the projects in Harlem in the wake of his brother's death...

children

Rises The Night (The Gardella Vampire Hunters, #2)

Colleen Gleason

10.0 (2 Ratings) Rate It

Book

The second installment in award-winning, New York Timesbestselling author Colleen Gleason's...

Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead

4.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a...

Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2165 KP) rated Full Bodied Murder in Books

Jun 6, 2019

Uneven Debut

Annie “Halsey” Hall has moved from New York City to Southern California, buying a house on Rose Avenue just a couple miles south of Santa Monica. She’s excited about her new neighborhood, except for her snooping next-door neighbor, and pleased to have been invited to join the Rose Avenue Wine Club. On her way to her first meeting, Halsey and her puppy, Bardot, stumble into the wrong house and find a dead body in the backyard. Even though Halsey has never met the victim, the police consider her their prime suspect. With the help of her new friends, Halsey begins to investigate. But with everything happening in the neighborhood, will they be able to figure out what really happened in time to clear Halsey?

Even though I don’t drink wine, I decided to give this book a try after meeting the author. I wanted to like it since it is set in Southern California, and I got a kick out of seeing the characters going to places I’m familiar with. However, I found the book was just a bit too unfocused to really work well. I thought there were timeline issues early on until I began to realize that the book takes place over several months. This wasn’t obvious early on, so maybe it helped explain some of the timeline issues I thought I saw. While Halsey is developed as a main character, many of the rest are still fairly flat. They can certainly develop as the series progresses, so I’m not too concerned about that yet. The book has a couple of interesting sub-plots, but they take over at times, and too much happens in them over the course of the book. It would have been better to stretch them out over the course of several books. The mystery plot has a lot going on, but it worked to keep me guessing until the very end. However, one key piece of evidence made me shake my head. It would have made more sense if the book took place over a week instead of many months. There is quite a bit of foul language for a cozy, even compared to some of the cozies and traditional books I read that are pushing the boundaries. Overall, this reads more like an early draft that needed some polish to find the gem inside, because there is certainly a gem here. Since I already have the second book, I might find some time to read it to see if the issues resolve themselves as the series progresses.