Customer Reviews

To Love and To Perish: An Annabelle Archer Mystery (Annabelle Archer Mysteries)

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As with the previous book in this series, I started out loving it and was much less enthused as the book went on.

With so many wedding planner series starting to pop up, the author really needs to kill the two most annoying parts of the series if she wants it to be successful and stand out from the others:

1) Kate messing up her cliches. It got annoying after about the third time, and was even more annoying being used to end chapters so that it stuck out even more. No one is this stupid as to mess up every single cliche there is. This gimmick is old and tired already.

2) Leatrice. This character adds nothing to the stories, and the main character can't even stand her. There's nothing the least bit amusing or entertaining about a nosy buttinsky who walks around in growling slippers and light-up sweatshirts.

Washington D.C. wedding planner Annabelle Archer is horrified to discover the body of one of her fellow wedding planners, Carolyn Crabbe, dangling from a balcony in a hotel ballroom, suspended by a length of wedding veil tulle. Making matters even worse, the ballroom where Carolyn is discovered is to be the site of Annabelle's premiere wedding of the Christmas season and the wedding is planned to start in an hour! Annabelle and her party-planner friends become literally scared for their lives when their wedding planner colleagues start dropping like flies. Annabelle and her assistant Kate try to do some "information gathering" on their own, in order to find out who is out to kill the wedding planners of Washington D.C. The amateur sleuths in this story provide lots of entertainment as they try to solve this mystery.

With tongue firmly in cheek, author Laura Durham takes the reader through some of the craziest society weddings ever imaginable. I laughed out loud at the image of a wedding reception complete with "miniature ponies" wandering through it! One of the pleasures of this series is the outlandish details of the weddings planned by Annabelle, details that are so bizarre that they could only be based on real-life weddings that author Durham has planned.

"To Love and To Perish" continues the entertaining cozy mysteries brought to us by Durham in the first two books in the series. I highly recommend this book to all readers of cozy mysteries.

A reasonable wedding planner (Annabelle, the main character) with a spunky, energetic, bouncy, fashionable assistant (Kate). The other characters are just as interesting - the caterer (Richard), the hairdresser (Fern), and the eccentric neighbor (Leatrice). The characters are well-developed; I enjoyed their humorous attitudes/personalities. This whole book was good and fun - the characters and the story line. And I actually liked Kate in this book. (Her messed-up sayings were kept to a minimum in this book.)

Wedding planner(s) is/are being murdered. Will Annabelle and Kate be next? That's a good reason to be on your toes! Annabelle needs to solve the mystery or else she might be next . . .

Location: Washington D.C.

This is the third (and I think last) book of this Annabelle Archer Wedding Planner series. All three books are really good. If you like wedding planner books with a touch of humor and fun, then I would recommend this series.

Annabelle Archer, DC wedding planner extraordinaire, and Richard, a caterer and friend, are checking out the last minute details in the ballroom before their bride is set to go down the aisle when they find Carolyn Crabbe, a hot-tempered wedding planner, strangled to death with a bridal veil in a hotel ballroom. Carolyn was well-known but not well-liked. She was the Queen of Mean.

Annabelle was seen arguing with Carolyn not long before she was killed, so she become a prime suspect. Then when another wedding planner is killed, Annabelle fears she may be next. She decides she had better find the killer and fast. But can she do that before anyone else is killed, namely herself?

Annabelle is so much fun! I wish she'd been my wedding planner. Except that murder seems to follow her around!

Kate, Annabelle's assistant, and Richard are wonderful characters in this series as well. They all complement each other, too. Having a wedding planner for a protagonist really provides a lot of wonderful storylines. The author has done such a fabulous job at creating and plotting this series.

I highly recommend this book and series.

What a fun read. Not only was it an absorbing mystery, but the cast of characters was hysterical. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a fun read.

This series started off strong, but it has unfortunately gone downhill quickly. The character development is very poor; you only get a superficial idea of who Annabelle is, and you really don't care, because there's not enough information about her to form an opinion. Her assistant, Kate, is extremely annoying in this book. In every chapter there is at least one example of Kate messing up an idiomatic expression such as "out with the old, in with the BLUE." No one is so stupid as to constantly screw up well-known sayings. It was distracting, annoying, and it affected the credibility of the story. The plot was o.k., but again, the constant dead bodies turning up stretched credibility. As a wedding planner, Annabelle would be much to busy to get involved in solving murders. While the reader does have to take such light mysteries with a grain of salt, the book pushed it too far. I would skip this entry in the series, and think twice before getting any future ones.

Annabelle "Annie" Archer is fast becoming one of Washington, D.C.'s top wedding planners. For some odd karma reason, where ever Annie goes dead bodies follow. (A bit macabre, but true.) Detective Mike Reese and her friends are getting very used to it though.

Annie has planned a huge Persian wedding at the Mayflower Hotel. Several weddings, throughout the hotel, are in various stages of completion. Annie's bride is due to walk down the aisle shortly. Annie and Richard, who owns the best catering company in D.C., are triple checking the ballroom decor when they spy a body hanging from the railings. The deceased is well known by everyone in the wedding planning and catering circles, but NOT in a good way. Seems that everyone who ever met the lady quickly became an enemy.

Soon it is obvious that a killer is targeting the area's wedding planners. Annie cannot resist digging for information. Annie justifies it to herself by believing she may be next and knowledge is power. Helping her are Kate (her assistant who never gets a quote correct), Fern (the city's best hairdresser), Leatrice (the nutty neighbor), and Richard.

Who ever thought that being a wedding planner was easy had no idea what they were talking about.

***** Laura Durham writes some of the best mysteries in the twenty-first century. Full of colorful characters and comical situations, I was unable to stop reading. The author adds special touches to her characters which make them so memorable. (Such as Fern who shoulders his way through a crowd yelling, "Coming through, people. I'm a hairdresser. I'm used to trauma.") A fun and witty mystery that is sure to win awards. *****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.

I spent the first two chapters of this book thinking I had accidentally repurchased the previous title. Hated chef dead vs hated wedding planner dead at wedding. Annabelle argued with each of them just before they died, sexy policeman turns up and patronises. Silly caterer thinks he will get the blame. Sillier assistant gets even sillier. Etc etc etc. BORING!!