11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Plain Brown Book, July 31, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Plain Brown Wrapper: An Alex Powell Novel (Paperback)
The heroine, Alexa Powell, is a light-skinned, quick with a quip African-American columnist who knows how to live well. This is made abundantly clear to us while she plays a slick game of Sleuth during which she and her ostentatiously well-educated, well-off African-American/colored/Black <as she calls them interchangeably> pals cavort through fine hotels, posh resorts and tony restaurants. The author, also light-skinned, evidently has a race-related chip on her shoulder the size of Hoover Dam. As a woman of color who is also a writer, I wished she would stop bashing us over the head with her contempt of Caucasians and get on with writing a witty novel with very appealing characters. Now that it's hopefully out of her system, maybe she'll relax and instead of taking every opportunity to snipe at "WPs", she'll let Alex be the smart, intuitive babe we all know she is under that touchy I'm-so-colored-and-don't-you-forget-it carapace.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
How the other half lives - and dies, August 2, 2001
This review is from: Plain Brown Wrapper: An Alex Powell Novel (Paperback)
"Plain Brown Wrapper" is not your average mystery novel, and I mean that in both good and bad ways. Let's do the bad ways first: author Karen Grigsby Bates spends much more time and energy than necessary detailing the expensive restaurants, posh hotels, designers clothes, Ivy League educations and top notch career posts that seem oh-so-necessary for novice detective(and journalist)Alex Powell and her circle of friends and colleagues. It's certainly not a world one can write about without firsthand knowledge and Ms. Bates seems to be letting the reader know, through her story, that this is her real-life world. I was reminded of the "Negro Geography" I first learned of in Benilde Little's book "Good Hair".
Now for the good ways: Ms. Bates has a keen ear for snappy dialogue,which moves the pace of the book along nicely and avoids those sometimes plodding moments in mystery novels when not much is happening. Through Alex Powell's sluething, the reader gets a clear sense of the victim - a well-known publishing magnate and ladies man - as a person and not just a chalk outline. The author also managed to throw in just enough red herrings to keep me changing my mind from one chapter to another on the indentity of the murderer.
Overall, a good beach read. It was fun, a little frivolous, and entertaining.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Plain Brown Wrapper, May 10, 2002
This review is from: Plain Brown Wrapper: An Alex Powell Novel (Paperback)
The question of the day is who killed Everett Carson? Carson, the successful publisher of a popular black magazine, is well known for all the wrong reasons. As an overbearing, abrasive, arrogant, calculating heartbreaker of numerous women, the list of Everett Carson's potential enemies is seemingly endless.
Given the previously noted facts, finding the person who caused his sudden demise in his hotel suite provides uphill struggle for the LAPD. Adding to the complexity of the murder was the location and time it took place, Everett Carson was in his hotel room preparing to receive the coveted Journalist of the Year Award in front of a Ballroom crowd of hundreds of his peers. Among his peers were dozens of competitors, colleagues, and even jilted lovers, most of whom had the opportunity and motive to commit this violent act.
Alex Powell, a former employee of Ev's and now a successful newspaper columnist in her own right is asked to check on her friend Everett Carson due to his uncharacteristic lack of appearance at his own banquet. Upon arriving at his room, Alex finds him murdered and consequently, is enlisted by the LAPD to assist in the investigation. Alex's reputation as a journalistic diva among the black elite as well as being a well known mover and shaker in the writing community, makes her a valuable resource in solving the crime.
Author Karen Grigsby Bates does her best to create a vivid image of her main character by exhaustingly detailing her journey through the haunts, social gatherings, and homes of the "well to do". Bates shows Alex's impeccable sense of style by describing seemingly every fashion decision Alex makes in her travels to find a killer. By not only providing information about Alex's clothing but providing ample information about the fashion no no's of others, I began to wonder if we were ever going to actually begin the development of the mystery.
After reading half of this novel without any changes in story line or interesting twists in the plot, it became really hard to maintain interest in the search for Everett's killer.
As a reader who appreciates strong characters in novels, I am constantly challenging authors to increase the level of detail when describing their main characters; moreover, if there was ever a case for a writer grossly over doing it, this book is it. I found "Plain Brown Wrapper" to drag on mercilessly, incessantly belaboring the same scenarios over and over while approaching an ending that proved anticlimactic at best.
As someone who is extremely partial to mysteries and probably too easily impressed by most efforts, it pains me to say that I would not recommend this novel.
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