Customer Reviews

And Not a Penny More

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

 

 

... And Not A Penny More is the follow-up to the first Bay Tanner mystery, In For A Penny. Bay is also a retired accountant, who is still recovering from losing her husband in a plane explosion which tore up her shoulder. Bay has a talent for sniffing out injustice. Her wheelchair ridden father, known as "The Judge," operates in the background to not only look after Bay, but to assist her.

Bay's old friend, now Countess and divorcee Jordan von Brandt, returns to South Carolina after her mother mysteriously dies aboard a cruise ship. Leslie Herrington was in perfect health, and Jordan wants answers. Bay joins Jordan and her brother Trey aboard a cruise ship destined for islands in the Caribbean, where Bay finds a new love in the unlikely ranks of Interpol, plus possible answers to her own past:

"That's what I'd like to know.' Darnay lit one of his foul French cigarettes and offered it to me. I waved it away. What do you have to do with Eddie Brown shoes?' he demanded. Who?' The guy who's been tailing you. The one who just came looking for us.' I have no idea what you're talking about.' Come on, Bay. Level with me. He doesn't have any reason to be interested in me, so it has to be you. What have you done to attract the attention of a Miami mobster?'"

Bay Tanner is a compelling, sexy heroine who chain smokes (cigarette country), runs away from the many men who pursue her, and uses her big heart and great instincts to save her friends from bad real estate deals, International terrorists, and serial killers. And Not A Penny More is an excellent follow-up to a series that treats the readers to enough thrills and spills to satisfy.

Shelley Glodowski
Reviewer

I just finished reading IN FOR A PENNY, an international intrigue with just the perfect hint of romance, and was thrilled to find that Kathryn Wall, a favorite new author of mine, did not disappoint her fans with the standard "second novel crank-out." A natural storyteller and seasoned wordsmith, Wall has once again crafted a complex and compelling plot and peopled it with a stellar cast of larger-than-life characters.

Bay Tanner, the gutsy little rebel-rouser heroine widowed in Wall's first novel, IN FOR A PENNY, is a chip off the Judge's salty block. Like her dad, Bay has nose for foul play and, since her husband's horrific murder in book one, an apparently unsquelchable passion for sleuthing. So when the matriarch of monied friends meets her untimely and suspicious death, Bay Tanner is hooked and off to the races again.

Wall should have called this one IN FOR A GRAND. It's a grand read and sure to leave readers primed and ready for the inevitable book three in the series.

C'est magnifique!

I read a positive review of this series and figured I'd like it. A strong, smart middle-aged heroine, Southern setting, a little bit of romance. Sadly, I was very disappointed. The writing was mediocre. I also found the privileged lives of Bay Tanner and her "ladies who lunch" friends to be extremely uninteresting. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters and gave up halfway through the book. Bay was far from a sassy no-nonsense heroine. She complained a lot, and seemed continually petulant. The kiss of death for me was the description of one of the (white) main characters as "exotic," "Oriental," with "slanting eyes" seemingly just because she has black hair. Oooh, black hair! Soooo exciting. What painfully boring lives these people live.

This is the second book on the series. I live in the Low country so it is intriguing from that point of view but Bay is getting better and better as is each book.

This is a fine story, well written, lots of intrigue and interesting plot, but I thought if Bay Tanner lit one more cigarette, I would throw this book into the trash can. (I would have but it happened to be on my Kindle.) If all the scenes with character after character lighting up were removed, there would be several hundred fewer words in this book. Yes, I am anti-smoking, but I can abide a couple of references to the habit in a good novel; but over and over and over is extremely distracting, and any writer who distracts her reader like this is taking away the desire to keep reading. Was the editor paid by the tobacco industry? I certainly hope in future books Kathryn Wall with have this interesting investigator give up smoking.