Customer Reviews

Dead Clever: A Lily Pascale Mystery (Lily Pascale Mysteries)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This first of three Lily Pascale mysteries is (how can I resist?) dead clever. Young Lily leaves her cheating boyfriend and dead-end London bartending job for some R and R in her small hometown in Devon where she promptly lands the perfect part-time job teaching crime fiction at the local university. Except one of her students has been gruesomely murdered. And some of the others are acting peculiar. And her new romantic interest comes under suspicion. Then the student who saw the whole thing (as we know, but Lily doesn't) seems to be going crazy.

Lily begins asking questions and before she knows it, she's investigating, withholding evidence and generally digging a deep hole she's only going to climb out of by solving the crime, a murder or two and a few close calls later. The plot gets a little wobbly but keeps moving, the characters are well drawn, the setting is lovingly rendered and the writing is crisp, fast-paced and humorous - though not quite as smart as it starts out to be. A promising beginning for a hip young protagonist.

Scarlett Thomas has a very clear, enjoyable writing style that lends itself well to the mystery genre. Her characters are interesting and complicated, her stories are tricky (in the end), but easy to follow. A joy from start to finish and recommended even to those who don't usually dip into the mystery genre, as I myself do not, except for this series.

I've read almost all of Thomas's oeuvre (everything except "Mr. Y"), and I'd recommend any of them to anybody. I just find her books straight-out enjoyable.

Quite ironic really considering the title of this distinctly routine piece; it wasn't dead clever to publish this and it must be wondered if Thomas regrets it now considering the outstanding Popco and The End of Mr Y rather like some actors have regretted appearing in certain films at the start of their careers. Let me put it this way, thank God I read The End of Mr Y first; if Dead Clever had been my introduction to Thomas' work it would have been my first and last. I won't bother giving yet another synopsis of the story, such as it is. Suffice to say that she does the English higher education system no favours at all: I mean can you really phone up, have a 2 minute chat and get a lectureship in a UK university and on the strength of a few weeks part time work, during which you do virtually no preparation, very little real teaching, no marking, give no tutorials and spend most of your time sleuthing around the `Devon drug scene', be rewarded by being made head of department?

Do yourselves a favour - skip this lightweight fluff and move straight on to either of the later novels. And to think some reviewers found it `brilliant'; the mind really does boggle!

I was quite disappointed upon finishing Dead Clever. After all, two august UK writers went to bat for Scarlett Thomas--Val McDermid and Reginald Hill--by allowing pleasant mumblings of theirs to be printed on the back cover of the book.

Lily Pascale is a young woman who's just finished her contemporary literature studies at the university level; and since then, she's been wasting her life by not getting a sensible job or boyfriend. When she finally adds things up, she runs back home to mom in rural Devon. Finding a bit of luck, she quickly lands a position at the local university teaching 1st and 2nd year students. Yet Lily was soon to discover that things are not as they seem in this sleepy little village!

What follows is a mildly interesting and somewhat silly tale of drugs and teachers acting unethically with their students. The science aspect to the book is wholly unbelievable and quite annoying--it almost seemed like Ms. Thomas was making fun of the genre in which she wishes to excel. Making her cat a character in the book, her sweet younger brother, and her disheveled but guileless gray-haired mother are all just cookie cutter stuff. It's a cute little chick lit book, and very unmemorable.

I bought this book, in fact- after reading a couple of reviews. But I'm a little perplexed by the descriptions of this novel as "hip" and "trendy." I was expecting something a bit more along the lines of Bridget Jones in a mystery format from the descriptions, but in fact the protagonist Lily is on the pedantic side, and unless listening to Radiohead is the sole qualifyer, she didn't seem very hip at all for a twentysomething. She comes across as a thinks-she-knows-it-all, and the mystery plot wasn't all that well executed. There are too many inconsistencies, and although the setting is nicely done and the writing isn't bad, there are far better hip young Brit sleuths out there.

Try Lauren Henderson or Liz Evans, for example, or Sarah Lacey's File Under: series. Another good one is Anabel Donald's Notting Hill series- Alex is much more hip than Lily!

Dead Clever engaged me for the first third, then I realized I didn't like where it seemed to be going: a few too many implausible events. But I came across the "word puzzle" and my interest was temporarily piqued. Oh, well, for the next evening I omitted half the book by skipping to the last 20-some pages. The ending confirmed I should be reading a better novel by someone else. And Dead Clever is a title chosen by two other writers. A pity.

Lily Pascale is a great new character. She's brash, funny, opinionated, and she doesn't let anyone else get her down. I like the fact that she strikes out on her own. She's got more brains than Bridget Jones!

This book is alot of fun and a must read! I can't wait for the next book in the series.

Maybe I've become too sensitized to smoking, but I found the number of references to lighting cigarettes and smoking a total distraction, sometimes more than once on a page. Like dripping water or a tic, I couldn't concentrate on the plot for waiting for the next cigarette. I've noticed that this occurs occasionally, usually in first books, and it doesn't seem to me that it adds anything in the way of the plot and not even the character or the atmosphere (except that it's polluted).