Customer Reviews

Fat Free and Fatal (Savannah Reid Mysteries)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
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The Savanah Reid series is fun, casual reading. Her character is flawed, yet intelligent and endearing. She's the girlfriend we all wish we had. I've read about half of the available paperbacks, and I've loved every single one.

If you like chic lit mysteries then you will definitly like this one! This book is well written with a fun story line. The characters are hillarious! Can't wait to read more in this series.

This review was written for Connie's Book Reviews and More on Facebook.

San Carmelita private detective Savannah Reid is going to work as a bodyguard for famous actress Dona Papalardo who is on the comeback trail. She disappeared after gaining weight, had gastric bypass surgery, and had all the details of her ordeal exposed to people who read tabloids. She feels alone except for her assistant and friend Kimberly Dylan. One night Kimberly was going out wearing Dona's clothes and getting into her limousine when a shot rings out and kills her in Dona's arms.

Detective Sargent Dirk Coulter talks Dona into hiring a bodyguard because he thinks the killer was trying to kill her. Savannah comes to live in Dona's mansion and when she isn't on duty as a bodyguard, she is helping Dirk look for the killer. What they find out is that Kim and Jack the gardener were using aliases that are in another state for fraud and larceny. Although they are not the killer but the murderer's victims, she knows they had an ulterior motive for working for Dona. They must find the killer but it is a piece of clothing that breaks the case open.

FAT FREE AND FATAL is an exciting crime caper that shows off G.A. McKevett's incredible storytelling ability. The heroine is a swell female who doesn't care that she is not society's ideal definition of a woman. Instead she is a strong independent woman who doesn't let herself be pushed around and thinks enough of her abilities that she does an investigation her way. There is plenty of action but the heart of this tale lies with Savannah and the support cast, who make her look like an amazon warrior doing battle.

Harriet Klausner

Many of the ingredients of this book sound promising. Readers of the series know that Savannah Reid, the SPOV private eye heroine, is a crusader against weight bias. She was fired from the San Carmelito police force for being overweight, has ten siblings back in Georgia, and is helped in her detective agency by her cute skinny blond factotum and two male gay friends. Her other friends and sometime collaborators are Dr Liu, the female medical examiner, who is gay and chocaholic, and Dirk the trailer-dwelling cigarette smoking slob cop. A Goth wannabe sister from Georgia intrudes. Some of the sexaul relationships are ambiguous.
In this one she is hired as a bodyguard for a movie actress whose star began to fade when she gained weight, and who has undergone ill-advised stomach surgery, and whose personal assistant has been killed.
In spite of all those promising premises plausibility is thrown out of the window. Each time you start to believe in the story another impossibility is thrown in. At times is seems that McKevett is deliberately writing parody, a spoof on the conventions of the romance novel, She goes off into these lush cliché-ridden passages at times when it just seems she might be building up a decent plot.
Inside Mckevett there's a good writer trying to get out, but the hatches are firmly battened down every time that begins to happen. Maybe she sits at home reading Updike and William Trevor and churns out these things to pay the bills. I suspect she's happy with the audience she aims at and aspires no higher. I'm sorry if that sounds snobbish. I mean it's ok to like romance novels and it takes talent to write one but readers expecting something along the lines of Sue Grafton might be disappointed. Kinsey Milhone, Grafton's Californian coastal town ex-cop female private eye is a much more complex character and those books contain carefully crafted plots and sophisticated irony.

This is one of a series which is fun to read. The characters are interesting, the plot is convoluted, and the final denouement is a big surprise.