Customer Reviews

Maid for Murder (Charlotte LaRue Mystery Series, Book 1)

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In Book One of this engaging series, "Maid for Murder," Barbara Colley introduces us to Charlotte La Rue, an efficient, often humorous, and effective amateur sleuth. (I'd hire her to clean my house in a flat second, but not if I had any crime-related secrets to hide!) Charlotte is a successful businesswoman, established in her small cleaning company and a real part of the community. By taking the reader along when Charlotte makes her rounds, Ms. Colley gives us a peek into how the upper crust REALLY lives, an insight that only a trusted maid could have. The story is excellent, the plot is intriguing, and Charlotte is simply delightful. I'm looking forward to her further adventures.

It's always a treat to find a new mystery author. Colley keeps the pages turning in this gentle cozy, with a charming heroine surrounded by a cast of friends and family who could turn into villains anytime. The heroine is especially well-done: a pushing sixty, energetic, too quick to say "yes" except to cover up a murder.
The book has all the ingredients: smooth writing, absence of trite phrases, deft plot. Maid for Murder doesn't have the sharp wit of Sharyn McCrumb's McPherson series or the self-conscious humor of M.C. Beaton. But it's a faster, smoother read than most others of the genre. Definitely recommended and let's hope we don't have to wait long for the second.

While I do agree the first part of the book was a tad slow, overall I found the book to be very enjoyable. A great murder mystery for those who don't want their murders too gruesome or complicated.

Charlotte La Rue needed something to support herself and her infant son when her lover died in Vietnam so she opened up a cleaning service Maid for a Day. Thirty years later, fifty-nine years old Charlotte has expanded the business which operates in the high society section of New Orleans called appropriately the Garden District. She is a good person who tries to keep a relationship with her clients on a business level but sometimes she fails.

One of the clients she ends up befriending is Jeanne Duboisson, a rich woman who stays home to take care of her sick mother. Jeanne's husband Jackson is rarely home and rumors come to Charlotte's attention that he is stepping out on Jeanne. When Jackson is found murdered in his own study, Charlotte reluctantly gets drawn into the investigation and to her surprise, she likes trying to figure out who the murderer actually is.

MAID FOR MURDER is a lighthearted amateur sleuth novel that bursts with humor yet contains pathos and poignancy. The characters are drawn very true to life and the reader will end up feeling sympathy for the victims as well as the perpetrator. Fans will enjoy Barbara Colley's very good debut novel.

Harriet Klausner

Charlotte LaRue is the owner of a successful maid service in the Garden District of New Orleans. One Monday, she shows up at her long term clients the Dubuisson's to discover that Jackson was murdered in the study. With her position as maid in the family, she's privy to a little inside information. While she struggles with what of that to share with her niece and her obnoxious partner, the detectives on the case, she stumbles upon some additional clues. What does it all mean?

I was really looking forward to this book because I'd heard great things about it. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The plotting was uneven at best. There were some interesting twists to the story, but I was bored during the last 50 pages and just kept going because I was so close to the end. We are given way too much information about the main characters; information that would be interesting if they were suspects. Ultimately, it does little more then slow the story down.

There is potential for a great series here, and I will give it another try. Hopefully, with some better editing, the series will rise to the heights I was expecting.

Charlotte La Rue likes her life the way it is, at fifty nine she is not yet ready to call it a day no matter what her son, a successful doctors, may think. She enjoys her quiet life, her steady clients and her talkative parakeet.

Having opened up her maid service to support herself and her infant son after the death of her boyfriend in Vietnam, Charlotte has not looked back and wonder how life should have been, she is too busy looking forward and what she sees is pretty good. That is until Jackson Dubuisson, the husband of one of her regular clients, is found murdered and a couple of things that Charlotte has witnessed on her regular cleaning days just aren't adding up.

It's hard to keep a professional distance when you see your clients as friends and your niece just happens to be one of the lead investigators, but Charlotte has seen a couple of things that just don't add up and being the helpful person that she is, she just had to lend her helping hand where she can. No matter how things turn out.

Barbara Colley almost had me closing the book before I had gotten started. Early on there is a comment made about Charlotte's sons first wife that was a bit snide and over the top for a cozy. It came off to me as more of a personal attack to someone that the author knew in real life. Maybe I took it wrong, but it was like a "there I said it and now the whole world knows" kind of thing. It was very off putting and didn't need to be there.

But I persevered and overall I'm glad I did, Colley introduced interesting characters that I'm sure will make future appearances and overall the writing and flow were steady, with the right amount of little red herrings sprinkled throughout the story to lead the reader down different paths in hopes that the who-done-it isn't found out too early.

I'll definitely check out the second book in this series.

Barbara Colley has, for years, written romance novels under the pen name Anne Logan. And reading "Maid For Murder," it's obvious. The style of the work betrays it as being written by someone more used to romance fiction. The prose often gets a bit too flowery and melodramatic, and nearly once a chapter Charlotte La Rue pauses to contemplate the horrid life she or one of the other characters has experienced. In fact, it seems that nobody in this novel has had an even remotely happy life -- practically every developed character has a past loaded with dead parents, dead spouses, divorces or some other tragedy.

The book is also quite clearly the beginning of a series. Several subplots are never resolved and several characters don't really contribute to the plot. This is forgivable, however, as they help to establish Charlotte La Rue's world, which will certainly be important in future installments. The next novel in the series, the cleverly-titled "Death Tidies Up," is due in bookstores in Feb. 2003.

Louisiana readers like myself will also be quite pleased with the New Orleans flavor Colley injects into the book. From accurate street names to using actual events like the Audubon Zoo's "Zoo To Do," the book is obviously the work of someone who knows and understands the region and not by a Hollywood outsider, suffering from the delusion that the city exists in a state of perpetual Mardi Gras like most contemporary fiction does.

Overall, "Maid For Murder" is a passable first novel for the series, although only time will tell if the series as a whole will be able to hold up with the works of classic mystery series like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot or more recent works such as Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak novels.

Maid for Murder (Charlotte LaRue Mystery Series, Book 1)

Started this new to me series as a reading challenge in one of my groups. I'm really delighted with this book. This is one cozy mystery you can really sink your teeth into. Charlotte is way too close to my age, though that does make it even more interesting to me. We definitely share the same humour. This book is very well written. The main characters are very likeable and for me, loads of fun. I'll definitely finish this series.

tHIS WAS QUITE POSSIBLY THE WORST MYSTERY I'VE EVER READ. I KEPT READING SIMPLY BECAUSE I WAS WAITING TO SEE WHAT THE AUTHOR WOULD HAVE HER CHARACTERS DO NEXT. IT WAS THOROUGHLY WRONG COMPARED TO WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN IN A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION. WHEN I CAME CLOSE TO THE END SHE DID SOMETHING SO STUPID, HOWEVER, THAT I QUIT READING ABOUT 20 PAGES FROM THE END.