Welcome, 2021! The only good things about 2020 were some really good books I read, the leap year tea that is only available every four years, and the pandemic puppy I bought. Hopefully 2021 will be a general improvement over what the world just went through.
A Murder Between the Pages by Amy Lillard Book store setting, small town, eccentric characters--it all sounded great. But I hated this book. I wrote 75 notes to myself on my Kindle, which is a record. Most concern the idiotic and very unrealistic behavior of the characters. Does that sound too strong? It's not. The story centers on a bookstore in a small Mississippi town, where a group of eccentric and very elderly ladies form the core of a book group, a bookstore owned by the adopted daughter of one of them. Arlo co-owns the bookstore, yet is able to just dash off following the eccentric older ladies at the drop of a pin, heedless of whether anyone can watch the store for her. Having worked in a bookstore and other small, privately-owned companies with just a few employees, that would quickly lead to a shuttered business and bankruptcy. Why Arlo felt responsible for these women, and why she couldn't corral them, is mentioned again and again and again and...to the point where I started yelling at the book "Just let them go alone, Arlo! Let them get arrested!" I had trouble understanding how the older ladies that comprise the book club were able to leap from the fictionalized account in their current selection to the real-life disappearance of a former town resident that is the plot. It just seemed very forced and not natural enough to be the basis for the plot. Their behavior was untenable. No police chief, no matter how small the town, no matter his personal relationship to the bookstore owner, would let people barge in to his office, contaminate crime scenes, and make off with evidence without repercussions. And the stealing of medical records by the old ladies, when the author is well aware of HIPAA? I really lost all interest in finding something to like about this book at this point. I disliked all of the old ladies and Arlo, and even the police chief in his complacence and the hunky Sam who indulged the ladies in their mischief. If the mystery had been well plotted, the book might have been salvageable. But there were so many ridiculous, unrealistic scenarios Who thinks a movie producer is going to call the Chief of Police in a small town not to discuss security details but to make the police chief make hotel reservations and act as project manager/major domo? A large, man-made lake is completely drained to look for a stolen necklace. No divers sent in to search; nope, completely drained. Where did the water go? No mention of where the pumps and hoses let the water out, and this was a lake deep enough to hide a Volkswagon for decades. A small town has the budget and equipment to do this? Borrowing a couple of divers from another county would have been realistic. It boggles the mind that the author thought these were reasonable ways to force the connections she needed to in order to advance her story. I could go on and on (see last month), but I'm stopping here and considering changing my Kindle settings so all those notes would be available to anyone who wanted to read them. This is not the first in the series, but I'm going to actively avoid the rest and suggest you do, too, Gentle Reader. Instead, read the next book.
Tea and Treachery by Vicki Delaney Cape Cod, a tea room, a Victorian mansion converted to a bed-and-breakfast--that's the setting for Tea and Treachery. Lily runs the tea room, while her grandmother, Rose, runs the B&B. When someone hoping to develop the property next door is found dead, they find themselves under suspicion from what may be a crooked cop trying to hide the truth. This was a fun read. Lily is a normal woman with normal problems--too little sleep, a grandmother she can't control but worries about, no time for romance and real business problems like not enough employees and a strawberry delivery that never arrives--this is a much more accurate portrayal of a small business than that in the previous book. And the ploy that ensnares our amateur detectives into the murder is realistic--the dead body is found on their property. Last but certainly not least, when Lily does stumble onto clues, she contacts the detectives, instead of assuming that she is smarter than them and keeping it from them. The hint of romance (yea, the gardener is swoon worthy), the just-enough mentions of tea and food Lily prepares to set the scenes in the tea room, the pace and setting on Cape Cod--all make for a very enjoyable and well written mystery. The comic relief of Bernie was a tad overdone. I hope she is relegated a bit to the back in the next book in the series, or matures a little with her possible new romance with a real author, because I found her character to be the one discordant element. She started off as a potentially interesting character, but her flightiness soon grew beyond quirky to annoying. Tea by the Sea is a series to which I'll return. Recommended.
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