In Too Steep by Kate Kingsbury I gave up reading Kate Kingsbury's Pennyfoot Hotel mystery series years ago because they were very formulaic and all starting to read the same, and plagued by that one thing I hate in historical mysteries--characters who act modern and speak modern despite the timeframe of the book. But I though I'd give this book, the second in the Misty Bay Tea Room series, a chance because I adore tea and I am off to vacation on the Oregon coast in two weeks. And maybe with a modern series, and the passage of time, the author would have improved or been motivated by a new character and a new location. But I was disappointed again; the book was pretty dreadful. The mystery is very contrived; the relationships are described in juvenile prose; there are inconsistencies in the way the characters act and speak.
The main character, who is almost the same age I am, made the cardinal sin (to this reader, anyway) of thinking the police were stupid (while encouraging her employee to date the detective investigating the murder) and that she needed more evidence before she could tell them her suspicions.
I found her personal quirks also a little irritating; we must have read the exact same sentence--that Vivian needed to make keys to the tearoom for her two employees--at least 7 or 8 times in various chapters. I was also not convinced by the basic premise, that Vivian felt so bad for the hermit that was murdered because he had no one to mourn him. People usually become hermits by choice; he's not homeless, he's purposefully chosen to live in the shack on the beach and eschew the company of people. I really doubt he would have cared that no one attended his funeral. It's not that I don't think Vivian was sympathetic to feel this way; it's a kind and admirable thought, but to seize it and use it as the excuse for her investigation, and the almost obsessive fixation she develops when there's barely any connection between her and the crime, was insufficient to establish the storyline. "Although she'd never met Lewis Trenton, she'd become so involved in finding someone to mourn him, she now considered him a friend." Without knowing anything about him at all. It just wasn't believable. We learn nothing about Lewis as a person because he's a complete nonentity in the book; he's an excuse, and a flimsy one at that.
The denouement was also contrived--after multiple references to "the three rookies" and bringing Jenna and Gracie to all her interviews of her suspects, when she finally thinks she's identified the killer, Vivian makes a clear decision to go alone to confront the killer? Yes, she has to be alone to set up the ending as written, but we've spent the entire book with all three characters traipsing around and investigating en masse. It just made no sense for her to undertake this one investigation on her own.
There were also a few glaring instances where it's really clear the author did no research for her book: there are strict laws about animals being restrained in cars in Oregon, and holiday-themed toys and pet costumes are a huge business in the US, yet Hal's pet store only has a a few because "dogs don't care about Halloween." Nope, that's true, they don't, but their humans do, and those humans spend a lot of money on holiday toys and costumes. Both of these glaringly obviously wrong sentences make it clear Ms. Kingsbury is banking on a steady stream of uncritical cosy lovers who don't care if her world reflects reality at all. But this reader does. I want enough realism to make the unrealistic premise of a cosy mystery--that an amateur can solve a murder mystery faster than the police--believable. Otherwise I get distracted by the errors and end up disliking the book.
I'm not sure if there will be a third book in the series, as it ends with Hal and Vivian making plans for a future that doesn't include the tea room, so maybe this was just a brief 2-book contract. But Ms. Kingsbury is writing too many series (I think this is number 5!), and they all suffer from lack of attention and time, so her numerous books go back onto the TBA pile. TBR = To Be Read. TBA = To Be Avoided.
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