Customer Reviews

Murder With All the Trimmings: Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper

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

 

 

I have all of Elaine Viets mystery shopper and dead end job mysteries and I love them all. I have to say by far, this is the best of the mystery shopper series. I have noticed that more and more mystery series are going for holiday themes, i.e. Joanna Carl's The Chocolate Snowman Murders and Shirley Murphy's 2007 Cat Deck the Halls Joe Grey Mystery. I cannot speak for the Murphy mystery as I have not read it yet, but I can safely say Viets beats out Carl's Snowman Murders for the better holiday mystery.

Josie Marcus is a loveable protaganist as a single mom and amateur sleuth and the recurring cast of characters is what holds the wonderful series together. In this book, Josie is soured on Christmas because she feels that she has been looking at holiday decorations since Labor Day, but when she is ordered to mystery shop two of the three holiday stores that have cropped up or lose her job, she does what any good mystery shopper would do, sucks it up, hopes for the best and brings a witness. The second shop is owned by her current boyfriend's rather colorful ex who would be more at home in a Halloween store than a Christmas shop. The experience is exactly what Josie expects and she writes an honest report, which as expected complicates everything. Viets doesn't stop there, she adds Josie's daughter's father into the mix who has recently been released from Canadian prison, where he has been serving a sentence for drug dealing.

What I love about the book, besides that it's Christmas-y, is that even though there are several complex issues being addressed, it never gets messy that it feels like Viets forgets what she's doing and the plot never bogs down. The end of the book is wrapped up like a tidy Christmas package and leaves me waiting eagerly for the next book in series, just as it should. If you're a fan of the mystery shopper series, you definitely want to add this to your collection and if you're just starting, I suggest you begin with the first book in the series and I promise you'll be clamoring for this one.

Sometimes a book is like a car accident -- it's so bad that you just can't tear your eyes away from it. Unfortunately, that was the case with this installment of the Mystery Shopper series.

I'm really not sure what the purpose of this installment was. There was really no mystery, because you knew from the start who was guilty. And the murder that did happen took over 100 pages into the book to actually occur. The coincidences were just too unbelievable to be taken seriously (for example, Nate showing up the very day his daughter decides to ask for the truth about her father). Mike's daughter, and the way Josie dealt with her (or rather didn't deal with her) were juvenile and annoying. However, the worst part was the dialogue, which was unbelivably stilted and silly. When I read, I want to imagine the characters speaking, not spend time reading the words over and over, sometimes out loud, because I know people don't really talk like this.

Finally, there was too much left untold. Did Elsie get her store back once the culprit confessed? Did Nate's father go back to Canada and will he continue a relationship with Amelia? What happened to the "Frosty the Deadman" dude?

With the Dead End Job series really not very good, I'm finding myself less and less likely to buy a book by Elaine Viets. It's a shame because I loved her Francesca Vierling series.

I'd probably be a card-carrying grinch if they issued cards for that, but I enjoyed this Christmas-themed mystery in Elaine Viets' mystery shopper series. Protagonist Josie Marcus is smart, funny, and likable, character flaws and all. She's raising her nine year old daughter Amelia on her slim earnings as a mystery shopper, with help from her mother who lives in the other half of her St. Louis duplex.

In this book, some of Josie's past decisions cause trouble at home. She lied to Amelia by saying Amelia's dad Nate was dead, when in fact he had been imprisoned in Canada for drug dealing by the time the girl was born. She's shocked when a very live, and actively alcoholic, Jake turns up on their doorstep. Amelia is thrilled with Jake and alienated by Josie's lies, and Josie's terrified by Jake's threats to take Amelia back to Canada.

In the meantime Josie's hunky plumber boyfriend has his own troubles. His skanky ex-girlfriend, the mother of his sullen sociopathic teenaged daughter, has opened a sleazy Christmas store franchise which is doomed to fail, as it's next to two competing, and better, stores.

Josie's mystery shopping assignments, her boyfriend's bad news ex and offspring, Jake and his scary drug dealing associates, and the suddenly rebellious Amelia, come together in a series of events which include obscene Christmas ornaments, commercial sabotage, fundamentalist pickets at the sleazy Christmas store, antifreeze in the chocolate sauce, and murder.

Josie doesn't always make the best decisions, but she's brave and resourceful. Viets creates some real suspense with this story, which was a very enjoyable read on a cold winter's night.

Next to the late Agatha Christie, Elaine Viets is my favorite mystery writer. Aside from a generous doze of humor, the inclusion of shopping tips galore at the end of her Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper series is genious. Add this to your collection.

It's amazing how Elaine Viets keeps giving us more and more. This is another take on her dead-end job series, but it's a continuous dead-end job. There is a lot going on in this story, and it keeps me on my toes.
I'm the type of reader who wants to find out who did it before the reveal. With these books, I'm left guessing until the end, but as soon as I see it, I hit my head and say "I should have had a V8". The clues are all in the book, but I always seem to miss the key one so I can say Ah-Ha!
This book is set realistically, and the characters are fun, creative, and not boring one bit.

Elaine Viets, author of the Dead-End Job Mystery Series, this time give us the latest entry in her Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper Series, which came out just in time for the recently-past Christmas holiday season. Josie has a history of almost willfully poor choices in men: At the tender age of twenty she broke off her engagement to a `good, decent man' for Nate, a dashing helicopter pilot who, after getting Josie pregnant [at which point she left college to become a mystery shopper], left for Canada to continue the drug-dealing of which Josie was unaware, and was then arrested as he was leaving Canada when drugs were found on his plane. Nate, recently out of prison and now an alcoholic, has shown up on Josie's doorstep, anxious to meet his now nine-year-old daughter, Heather. Josie had fallen in love with Nate's `wildness and unpredictability,' but those qualities can make for bad parenting.

The book is replete with broken and dysfunctional [or `blended' and `unconventional,' depending on whether one's terms are current or more old-fashioned] families: Nate's father's wife ran off with another man, ending that marriage; Josie's mother's marriage had ended badly; Mike, Josie's present boyfriend, has a 14-year-old daughter [with his `witchy' ex-girlfriend], a sullen girl whose relationship with Josie's daughter is antagonistic, to say the least. Josie meets the ex-girlfriend, Doreen, when she opens a store in their St. Louis neighborhood, strangely the third all-year-round Christmas stores in the space of three blocks. Of course, Doreen's `alternative Christmas' store has the distinction of selling `pornaments,' pornographic Christmas ornaments and decorations. When her store is picketed, Doreen is called `Satan's handmaiden.' Bad feelings, and worse, abound.

The usual charming characters from this series are present, including Josie's neighbor, Stan-the-Man; Mrs. Mueller, the neighborhood gossip [perhaps somewhat less than `charming]; her mother, Jane, who lives in the upper floor of their house, without whose help Josie probably wouldn't survive. When Josie, and then Mike, are suspected in two murders, their relationship suffers, and Josie's best friend tells her "I bet if you found the killer, things would go back to the way they were." So she sets out to do just that.

There were a couple of inconsistencies, e.g., though Josie's boss faxes documents to her when necessary, at one point when Josie needs to fax something to someone she has to run out to the local Kinko's. And there were some things that were redundant, such as tears `leaking out of' Amelia's eyes on more than one occasion; and the reader being told more than once that Amelia has her grandmother's stubborn streak. But the story is fast paced and keeps the reader interested till the end, when the mystery is solved and hints are given about Josie's romantic future. Josie is a sympathetic and spunky protagonist, and it's a fun read.

I have enjoyed every one of Ms. Viets' previous books (although the Helen Hawthorne series is by far my favorite). The Josie Marcus series has been (up until now) almost as enjoyable. I especially enjoy the descriptions of "mystery shopping" (a career I never knew existed) and her detective experiences with her side kick Alyce. Ms. Viets has a wonderful ability to pinpoint and parody so many different aspects of America. Each of her books is an amused, cynical vignette of some facet of American culture.

However, this book presents a slightly different venue, with the focus primarily on personal relationships-specifically, Josie's worthless ex-lover (and her daughter's father), her current lover( anlong with his loathsome daughter)and Josie's bratty daughter Amelia (my least favorite character). I read Ms. Viets books for amusement and entertainment, not for insight into fictional psyches. I'm not negatively critcizing Ms. Viets for deepening her characters, but it's not why I read this series.

Just my opinion, of course, but I miss the humor and cynicism that are such outstanding features of the previous books.

"Murder with All the Trimmings" by Elaine Viets is an entertaining very real book. The heroine, Josie Marcus, is a mystery shopper. That is a person who buys a predetermined object in a store, just as anyone would, and fills out a form about service, quality, ambiance, etc. (How do I get a job like that?) Josie is a single mother who is fortunate enough to have her mother living upstairs. Ms Marcus is very impulsive and, while not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, is much like any one of us or our best friends.

Unfortunately, Josie's ex husband , who had been in jail in Canada, shows up drunk on her doorstep. Even more unfortunately, Josie had preferred to tell her daughter that her father was dead, rather than telling her the truth that he was a jailed drug dealer. Obviously, this alienated Josie's nine-year-old daughter who acted out much as any one of us might have and Josie apparently did when she was young. (As outsiders we can see Josie turning into her mother, as any of us would.)

The mystery is almost incidental to the interaction of the characters. This interaction is perfectly real and absolutely terrific. If you don't see either yourself or people you know in these characters, you should get out more. The mystery itself is less realistic which is why the book only gets 4 stars. It is definitely a good read. I like this series.

As always this is another great Josie Marcus mystery shopper addition to all the previous stories. A pleasure to read.

I started devouring Elaine Viets' books after reading about her in a local Florida paper and I'm hooked on her both her Mystery Shopper series (which includes Murder with all the Trimmings) and her Dead End Job stories. Makes me proud to share a state with her! Don't miss this latest installment in the Josie Marcus saga, but do yourself a real favor and read all of her earlier books in both series. Elaine has a way of spinning a great murder mystery with characters that are quirky, funny and believable all at the same time.