Customer Reviews

How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams

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

 

 

This book almost made me late for Mass, something which Ellie Haskell would probably have understood. How could I have possibly torn myself away with a mere 25 pages remaining although time was running out? I didn't and I am unrepentant. Karisma, the male cover model of the title, is a hilarious spoof of Fabio. (Neither is the man of MY dreams, but I am repulsed by any man who looks as if he could snap my bones like twigs.) I loved the snatches of imaginary romance novels. They reminded me of the Barbara Cartlands and Harlequins I read when I was a teen, but these were much funnier. I think the late Georgette Heyer would have enjoyed them, too -- she was so good at skewering the excesses of the genre. The rest of the book is the sort of fun I've come to expect from this series. There are so many twists and odd coincidences that I don't feel bad for coming to the same spectacularly wrong conclusion that Ellie did. Can't leave this review without expressing my appreciation for the author's double nod to Joan Hess when she announced that Zinnia Parrish would be writing a sequel to a book by the late Azalea Twilight [see Hess's *Strangled Prose*]. Oh, and I mustn't forget to rave about the cover! It's a pity that Amazon.com shows you only the front cover because the back cover is even better! It's delightful! It's inspired! I had to laugh! Thank you! Ann E. Nichols

I was charmed by the title and was ready to be satisfied, when I bought this book and took it on vacation. Since I regularly read all sorts of stuff, good, bad, pulp, and critically acclaimed, I didn't worry about it being too fluffy; I just wanted an entertaining story. I ended up in that state one gets into, where one keeps reading and reading, hoping it would improve, hoping the characters would gain more dimension or behave believably or that something would tie in all the seemingly loose ends and improbabilities, until I reached the denouement, whereupon the ridiculously unbelievable ending dissapointed me further and I just wished I could have back all the time I'd wasted reading it.

specific gripes:
Unrealistically bland reactions by characters witnessing surprise deaths of close acquaintances and near neighbors.
Unrealistic characterization of the German nanny, including offensivively trite rendering of her supposed english speaking mistakes.
Aggravating constant lack of logical behavior and self-confidence by a healthy happily married woman with a handsome adoring husband, two healthy happy kids and lots of friends.

A few good parts: I liked the satirical representation of the vain, handsome hunk who "lurves women", and I liked the way the sultry cousin turned out to not be all bad.

I've read four books by this author, three of them about Ellie Haskell, resident of Chitterton Fells and member of the Library League. In some ways I thought this was the best of them all -- Mrs. Malloy is hysterical here and the premise revolving around romance fiction is funny as well. But there are also minor problems. The mystery itself is confusing -- lots of people die, but not necessarily of unnatural causes, and the tension never really builds; the depiction of the village's two librarians is lazy and stereotypical; and two of Cannell's best characters, Freddy and Jonas, are not here -- they are away on a camping trip!

Despite the problems this is a fun book. I would recommend it if you are a fan of the author, but not if you are mainly interested in reading a challenging mystery.

<<AVOID THIS THING LIKE AMOEBIC DYSENTERY>>

I finished this "novel" feeling as though I had slogged through fifteen miles of day-glo swamp. It smacks of a sequel written under contract by an author who needed to make payments on a car. The "delightfully quirky" characters and the "kooky" goings-on were so unimaginative, relentless, repetitive and uninspired that I only finished the wretched thing so that I could review it in good faith and forget about it.

Devoid of wit, style and substance, it succeeds neither as a puffy comedy or an arch "woman's" novel. (And in its moronic way an insult to the romance community) Obviously intended for people with IQs lower than their shoe sizes.

And to raise the question that irked me for 200 of it's pages: why is this ATROCITY classified as crime fiction or a MYSTERY? The only crime that occurs takes place in the last 50 pages of mess. Instead we are treated to a relentlessly neurotic romance-fanatic (with an irrationally devoted husband) who remains at the same pitch for the duration. If a man had written this, he would be decried as misogynistic. Not only does it fail as a mystery, it is about as suspenseful as a pedicure. Tedious isn't the word: think gum-surgery. About as funny as a metastatic mammogram.

Ms. Cannell's prose reads like something dreamed up by a marketing department: a horrifying hybrid of hack romance novelist and armchair sleuth intended to encourage cross-over readers between the genres... Leaving us with this dismal, stitched together, seeping-seams-and-bolts-exposed mess of a fictive Frankenstein with which to prop up a dresser. A "book" not to be read lightly but to be hurled with great force into the furthest furnace. Abysmal.

I just finished this book, which was the most light-hearted, inventive, delicious read I've had in a really long time. A page- turner with characters who are completely improbable and very touching and believable at the same time. Cannell does a brilliant job of weaving together a dozen plots. I laughed out loud for most of the book. It's a love story, a mystery, a sneaky rumination on duty and daily life (but so gracefully done that it never gets didactic.) I can't compare her to any other writer -- I know writers who try to be this funny, but very few who succeed.

I'm going to read the rest of the Ellie Haskell mysteries. I'm so glad there are more!

I love Dorothy Cannell's work. You'll always find rich plotlines and wonderfully wacky and well-developed characters. The humor is subtle and facetious. This book is my favorite, with her spoof on Fabio. The main character, Ellie Haskell, is so likeable, with her addiction to romance novels and the way she barely manages to survive all that's going on in her life. This book is not a fast read, but rather like a very rich dessert. You'll want to take your time reading it and enjoy every word and turn of phrase. Beautifully done!

Still reeling from the sheer bloody awfulness of 'How to Murder Your Mother-in-Law' I thought that I should give Dorothy Cannell another chance, and so I read 'How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams'.

if anything, it is even worse than the earlier book, if such a thing wer possible. A model who poses for the covers of romance novels is visiting the villag ein which the heroine, Ellie Haskell, lives. He causes a lot of excitement among the lady residents of the village. There are several deaths, but naturally it doesn't occur to the bird-brained Haskell woman that there is anythign suspicious about them until the third on.

There are a lot of wildly improbably characters in the book. There's the batty old lady who was jilted by her bridegroom sixty years ealier, and has never gone out by daylight since (you could just about swallow it in Dickens, but in a modern murder mystery? Come on). She is described as wearing 'a pre-WWI bonnet' Since she must have got married in 1934 (this book was published in 1994) you wonder why she is wearing a pre-WWI bonnet? Unless of course Dorothy Cannell doesn't know the difference between WWI and WW2, which would not greatly surprise me.

Then there's Greta, the German home help who has been thrown out by her husband because he's fallen in love with another man (evidently in Cannell-land, married women have no property rights, nor divorce lawyers come to that).

Probably silliest of all is the lady who fled on her wedding night thirty years before in shock when her husband revealed the facts of life to her. "It was a different era then" Ellie Haskell says solemnly. Yes indeed it was, the sixties, but from what I can recall of the era, ignorance of the facts of life was not an outstanding feature of the decade.

The idiot Haskell woman spends most of the book drooling over her husband, and only notices that people are being murdered after the third death. The detecting is perfunctory in the extreme and crammed into the last twenty or so pages of the book.

I have read a lot of murder mysteries that I didn't aprticularly care for for one reason or another, but I accept that other people like them. Live and let live. Dorothy Cannell's 'mysteries' are, however, so abysmally bad that I really cannot fathom how any mystery fan could possibly like them.

This is a cozy-style mystery: written about the happenings in a small village, with a lot of emphasis on the characters. It has a good deal of dry humor - sometimes so dry you almost miss it. I managed to slog thru the whole book, hoping it would get better, but it really didn't. The pacing of the story was very slow, and there was no real sense of suspense or building towards a climax. The high point was barely a bump in the road. There were just too many subplots and points that distracted my attention, most of which didn't have enough of a payoff in the end when the threads tried to come together (and many of them didn't link at all) I suppose some of the plotlines were intended to be red herrings, but it is overkill when you're completely distracted and bored by long tangents that have no satisfactory resolution.

Dorothy has done it again! Even though my spouse looked at the book on nightstand and then promptly announced he'll be sleeping on the couch it was worthwhile! It permitted me to stay up late into the night reading like you will laughing out loud as Elie stumbles across a librarian mysteriously and meeting her demise in the city library, then finds herself vis-a-vis with "Karisma" the hunk of hunks from her favorite romance novels coming to town. Karisma becomes endangered by possibly the same entity that caused the librarian to have a meeting with the grim reaper and Elie finds her own life endangered unless she finds the mysterious presence of Chitterton Fells Library. Don't miss this especially if you're a Dorothy Cannell fan!

Satire is perhaps the most difficult form of humor to do well, and this one is definitely not to my taste. Perhaps if you are so familiar with the romance genre that you can catch all the "inside" jokes, but...The prim librarian secretly reads romance novels all night, chuckle. The heroine turns down her husband's amorous advances to stay up late with the latest romance tome, har, har. The funniest premise in the book is that a typical American, middle-class family can afford to hire a gardener, a Swiss au pair, AND a woman who comes in to help twice a week!

The next time I want to read a mystery-romance-satire, I'll go back to the ever-reliable misadventures of dear, old Hank the Cow Dog and his eternal triangle with Beulah the collie and Missy Coyote.