Customer Reviews

Murder in Store

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Very nice little crime novel, well written and a pleasant read. Nothing that is over the top violent or graphic. Just a good old whodunnit with a main character who is sympathethic and yet totally low key. I enjoyed it, perhaps because the writer didn't need to creat any cheap thrills to keep my attention. It was sort of like a Jessica Fletcher except without the old lady, or B actors or cheesy scripts. Ok maybe Murder She Wrote is a bad example. I loved the simplicity of it. The only minor issue was that some of the formatting was slighty off, only the occasional sentence nothing majorly disruptive to the flow of the text.

I read another book by this author (Getting Sassy) that I really enjoyed because it was so . . . well, different (in a very good way), so I was eager to read this one, as well. This book, while not "different" like Getty Sassy (you really have to read that one to know what I mean), is distinctively this author. There's something about the interior monologues and the knack she has for really fleshing out the main characters and leaving the lesser characters ever so slightly out of focus (like when you start getting too close to a Monet). This can be frustrating to some readers, but when it's done well, it's quite wonderful. Brod does it well.

One thing that rather surprised me about this novel was that the main character was a guy; I guess because of Getting Sassy, I expected Brod to do what most first-person novelists do and write all protagonists in the same (and her own) gender. So I kept waiting for the lead (Quint McCauley) to suddenly start fretting about his hair or something, but again, Brod impresses. The guy's pretty much a guy, much like any other guy written by any male writer . . . okay, so there's this one time he knows the particular fabric of a woman's dress, but . . . hey, some macho ex-cops turned security heads and pseudo-PI's are great with fabrics. It was a small thing, and I'm sure most people wouldn't even notice something so tiny.

Anyway, the novel itself is a mystery with all the "usual" things going on: someone solving the mystery, a sidekick, the foil, the red herring, the clues, etc. If you love that stuff (and I do), this is very well written and fun to read.