Reading Mediocre Books

I don’t know why I read mediocre books, but lately I’ve read several.  For the most part they weren’t terrible, or at least they had some redeeming characteristics, or I wouldn’t have finished them.  In some instances I read them because I had purchased them, albeit on sale, and wanted to get my money’s worth. 

“What about your time?” a voice inside my head asks insistently. Another small voice whispers seductively, “You see what gets published, you can do as well.”  The discussion continues ad nauseam as I critique the books in my head.

 

A Talent for Murder
R.T. Jordan
(Kensington Books, 2009)

Purchased on sale, this book got my attention because the protagonist, Polly Pepper, is an older actress and an amateur sleuth who is the “nice” judge on a reality show, “I’d Do Anything to Become Famous.”  Other than Polly Pepper having a flamboyant personality and life style that was somewhat amusing, the book had few redeeming characteristics.  The answer to the question of what people would do to become famous turns out to be have sex with anyone, no matter what their gender, and to kill each other.  Perhaps the author, a publicist at Walt Disney Studios, was trying to show the absurdity of television reality shows and the depths to which people who produce and appear on them have sunk, but it didn’t work for me.  I was left wondering why I had read the book.



The Devil's Puzzle
Clare O'Donohue
(Plume/Penguin Publishing Group, 2011)

The Devil’s Puzzle is part of a series featuring Nell Fitzgerald who helps her grandmother run a quilting store in the small town of Archer’s Rest.  The events in this book take place during the preparations for the big Fourth of July celebration when a skeleton is found in the yard of Nell’s grandmother.  Everyone in town is a suspect as old secrets and former relationships surface, creating lots of red herrings.  There is nothing wrong with this mystery, but it didn’t really engage me—not the characters, the setting, the milieu, nor the plot—but I did complete it to see “who done it.”  Another reader might like this book better.  At least it is suitable for sharing with my older friend down the street who likes mysteries and sewing.



Double Shot
Diane Mott Davidson
(William Morrow, 2004)

I picked this up on sale because I used to read this cozy series by Diane Mott Davidson and enjoyed the capers of the caterer, Goldy Schultz, and her friends.  Dead bodies turn up in the course of their catering jobs, and Goldy solves the mystery and cooks a lot.  I like the cooking part and the setting in Colorado, but nothing else works in this mystery.  Goldy’s abusive ex-husband is murdered, and the reactions of the characters are unbelievable, especially Goldy’s teen-age son who is devastated despite knowing how his father treated his mother, other women and people in general.  The father was totally immoral, and the reader is supposed to believe a teen-age boy would have no concern or awareness of this fact, nor exhibit any ambivalence about his father.  The ending is equally absurd.  This is a book that must have been written on deadline with no one much caring about the content.

 

Christmas Carol Murder
Leslie Meier
(Kensington Books, 2013) 

Loaned to me by a friend and certainly the best of the lot here, this is another cozy series that I’ve read and enjoyed in the past. Small town newspaper reporter Lucy Stone and her family live in Tinker’s Cove on the coast of Maine—okay, that is two pluses upfront for the series: small town newspaper and coastal Maine.  The recession has hit Tinker’s Cover hard and the number of foreclosed properties is growing, and the town is cutting back on the hours of their employees, creating further hardships for the holidays.  Local company, Downeast Mortgage is one of the main culpable entities as they made balloon loans to people in town that they now can’t pay, and the mortgage company is foreclosing on people rather than letting them restructure their payments.  When a letter bomb kills one of the mortgage company’s owners, there is no shortage of suspects.  Juxtapose this with the local production of “A Christmas Carol” and you have the setting for a Christmas morality tale. 

For a bit of an upgrade in my reading life, I’ve now switched to historic fiction.  Stay tuned for that review.