Customer Reviews

Killer Blonde (Jaine Austen Mysteries)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When Jaine gets the phone call, she thinks she's hit the mother lode. SueEllen Kingsley wants a ghost writer for her party planning and recipe book and is willing to pay three thousand dollars a week. Jaine soon finds that working for SueEllen is hardly worth the effort. The woman is mean to all around her, especially her step-daughter. After a few days, Jaine is ready to quit. But when she arrives to resign, she finds her employer dead. With the police focusing on the step-daughter, Jaine steps in to find the real killer. Meanwhile, her parents are having another crisis. Seems her father has bought a used toupee that looks horrid and insists on wearing it at all times. Can Jaine help her mother from three thousand miles away?

Having read the previous two books, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this one. I was once again rewarded with a hilarious book with a great mystery. The plot left me plenty confused; I never would have guessed the killer. Laura Levine is the queen of the one-liner. I was laughing the entire way through the story. The sub-plot with Jaine's parents just adds to the fun. Jaine is charming and sympathetic heroine, and you can't help but root for her to solve the latest puzzle.

If you have never met Jaine Austen before, you are in for a treat. This is a wonderfully charming cozy series. Once you get started, you'll want to read them all.

This Jaine Austen installment was very enjoyable. Ms. Levine is such a clever writer. She writes a great mystery with lots and lots of humor entwined.

A blonde socialite hires Jaine to be her ghostwriter. Jaine soon learns that she is working for a wicked stepmother. After a few days on the job, Jaine shows up for work to find her employer murdered. Jaine has made friends with the stepdaughter and doesn't believe she was the killer even though the police think that very thing.

After many days of sleuthing, Jaine is sure the mystery is solved and that all loose ends are tied up. However, a surprise ending makes this book riveting until the last page.

The writer has many red herrings throughout and just when you think you know you find yourself surprised.

As soon as I read this book by Laura Levine I had to order the rest of her "Jaine Austen" series. She's funny, she's entertaining and she writes a great mystery. She "grabbed" me right away. Her books are page turners. I was impressed with the unusual way she includes her family in her books. I don't believe she started including "emails" from her zany parents until her second mystery in this series but they are inventive and now expected as well as anticipated in each one she writes. She has a flare for humor and that's what I enjoy and look for in mysteries. If you favor a whodunit with a little more than the usual and sometimes boring quessing game of which character in the book is the guilty party, this is a great series to start with. She's right up there with Janet Evanovich, Sarah Strohmeyer and Lori Avocato - just to name a few. I wish I could give her more than 5 stars!!

Murder mysterious aren't my usual genre, but this book would more accurately classified as chick-lit. It was laugh-out-loud funny, and was written with the same type of witty flare and snappy dialogue as Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series, but with a much more responsible heroine and more realistic storyline. As I was reading along, I thought the murderer's identity was so predicatable, but I was way off-track, as lots of suprising twists are unraveled.

Jaine Austen - no relation to the author - can't be picky about clients, when she's got a Ben & Jerry's habit that would surprise an army, and her neurotic cat, Prozac, is constantly on the lookout for fresh fish guts. So when she's offered the position of ghostwriting a book of hostess tips for Bevery Hills socialite SueEllen Kingsley, she agrees instantly. After all, the amount of money she'll be making each week will definitely keep her thighs happy. But everything goes down the tube when Jaine finds SueEllen floating facedown in her bathtub - her home away from home - electrocuted by her very own blowdryer. The primary suspect? SueEllen's overweight stepdaughter Heidi, who wished the woman dead just hours before her death, and whose account of witnessing a mysterious blonde fleeing the scene is tossed aside as a lie. Now, with bottle blondes abound, Jaine must figure out which one was capable of killing SueEllen, before Heidi is put away.

It is hard to find a mystery series that keeps you intrigued and laughing at the same exact time from beginning to end, but that's exactly what Laura Levine has managed to do in every single novel starring Jaine Austen. KILLER BLONDE, like THIS PEN FOR HIRE and LAST WRITES is a bubbly who-done-it that leaves the reader on the edge of their seat trying to figure out who was capable of the murder, and whether or not Jaine will finally meet a good guy who will love her - and her thighs. Overall, this was a fabulous addition to the Jaine Austen series that will keep readers guessing until the very last page.

Erika Sorocco
Book Review Columnist for The Community Bugle Newspaper

Laura Levine has really hit her mark with this book I laughed for hours and hours . I think she is even better than Evanovich This book is a fun read I reccomend it to everyone who needs a good case of comic relief

I was anxiously awaiting the third installment in this series but it has been a big disappointment. The ending is implausable - many characters are considered suspects throughout the book, but no clues are given about the real killer (or any of the suspects) that would lead the reader to the logical conclusion of who did it. The author just ups and tells you who did it at the end of the book. I guess that's a long way to say there's no suspensful buildup to a climatic ending. And without giving away the ending, it is just too unbelievable that the victim wouldn't have recognized the killer for who she really was. It just doesn't happen that way. Also got tired of the continual references to the the cat "licking her privates". It was funny the first time but grossly overused and annoying by the end of the book. Cats do lick themselves in other places, ya' know? Don't waste your money buying this book - wait till you can check it out for free at the library if you absolutely must read it.

The popular new literary trend of the "funny murder mystery" is a trickier genre than it seems. All too often, such novels are either not comedic enough to be funny or not mystifying enough to be mysterious. Or both. Laura Levine is one of the few authors in this field who has a skillful grasp of both elements of her story. "Killer Blonde," like her previous novels, delivers not only a sharp, breezy wit, but an involving "whodunit" as well. SueEllen Kingsley, the successful gold-digger with "flotation devices" for a chest, a heart of lead, and a brain to match, is a scarily, hilariously memorable character, and there is not a boring line to be found in heroine Jaine Austen's efforts to find her killer. Highly recommended!

"Killer Blonde" is delightful, and full of the wit and comedy of Laura Levine. Levine fans will not be disappointed. Main character, Jaine, takes a job as a ghostwriter for a rich woman who works out of her bathtub. When the would-be authoress dies, Jaine's heart goes out to the step-daughter, and she tries to clear her as a suspect and find the real murderer. I guessed who the murderer was before the book ended, which tells me that part of the plot was somewhat weak, since I usually don't know whodunit until the end of most books. Entertaining nevertheless, an excellent feature in the Jaine Austen series is that you don't have to read them in order. Buy if you are a Levine fan. But if you are looking for a great mystery, you may want to skip this one.

Laura Levine obviously has a background in sitcom writing--this book reads like a mystery/sitcom, with a schtick-y feel. I can almost picture Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the role of Jaine, our lovable heroine, always self-deprecatingly funny, carrying on more conversations with her cat than anyone else, and stumbling into mysteries and their solutions. Levine's meta breaking of "the fourth wall" --"I've actually helped solve two murders. (Which you can read about in This Pen for Hire and Last Writes, now available in paperback at a book store near you.)"-- was a bit disconcerting to me at first, but it all works and it's an easy, quick and enjoyable read. Nothing heavy--just good fun.