There are some good sentences in this, for instance, the opening one 'There is no place for a body in the little office at the back of my bookstore - not even mine', page 1, and page 49, 'I resisted the urge to tweak his goatee, which looked as if it were made of horse hairs and attached with spirit gum'. ( )

This is the first of the Claire Malloy cozy mysteries. It was a quick read. Like many cozies the dialogue wasn't realistic. It was trying too hard to be funny. I liked the two teenage girls. The mystery was good. It involved a romance novelist. ( )

f you don't mind a verbose author (in my opinion she couldshould have cut at least 50 pages of snark, innuendo and sarcasm) then this seems to be the author for you.

If you like the Arly Hanks series don't expect this one to be similar. It is so far into a different realm as to be nearly unrecognizable as the same author. Perhaps that was Ms Hess's intention. Perhaps she thought that she should write something 'highbrow' to offense the fun that is Arly Hanks.

The plot had holes big enough that you could drive a truck through some of them, the characters were not fleshed out very well (although perhaps they flesh out better later in the series), the back story comes at very odd times. Such as the author talks about Ms Malloy's late husband at a time in the book that left me wondering if I had missed a book and that this one wasn't the first in the series. Claire's daughter is obnoxious (not all 14 year old girls are obnoxious) in a very trite way.

The relationship that is most likely going to develop (actually by reading the synopsis of some of the later books I know it does) is with the cop that is investigating the murder and Claire specifically. And maybe I'm not a cop, but boy, unless things really are that different in small college towns in the South this "investigating" was far from realistic. Yes I know that this is fiction so an author can pretty much write about things in whatever manner they want---but it sure help the authors credibility to stay within the realm of realism.

Perhaps the series gets better as it goes along and maybe the snark and sarcasm will grow on you -I'm not going to give it a chance.

Beside I really dislike authors that put down people who like certain book genres that the author doesn't produce -- it sort of reminds me of a child who makes fun of another child because the second one can do something well that the first child can't. ( )

I'm afraid the title is quite apt. The plot involves a murdered romance writer, and the prose was on the level I expect from the romance aisle--strained metaphors, intrusive irksome dialogue tagging--and even more irksome characterizations. This is told first person, and our narrator, Claire Malloy, describes her own daughter in ways that make her sound like a twit. And yes, I know, Caron and her friend Inez are 14--an awkward and annoying age--but I still never bought either character. We're also supposed to believe that a campus equivalent of NOW is so shocked, shocked by the very idea of a romance book they're planning to protest it even before it's released. Well, given romance books are fifty percent of paperback sales, I'd say they have their work cut out for them. I just never believed in any of the people in this book as real--and I guessed the major twist and identity of the murderer within a few dozen pages--before the actual murder. ( )

When Mildred Twiller breezes into her bookshop informing Claire that she is going to hosting a book-signing, Claire can't find a way to say no until it is to late.
But things NEVER go right with Claire, do they? Azalea is found dead - and all Claire has to do is determine which of the couple of dozen or so possible suspects did it, convince Officer Peter Rosenberg she is correct, and keep Caron and Inez out of trouble (and jail) the whole time. ( )