Customer Reviews

Plain Brown Wrapper: An Alex Powell Novel (Alex Powell Novels)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

Plain Brown Wrapper is well-written, the characters are well developed and it has a good premise (a murder at an NABJ convention) but --- I think the book works better as a primer on fine hotels, cuisine and the French language than as a mystery. You can read entire chapters and forget that you're reading a mystery actually, but I did like the book and the Alex Powell character. Thank God for a black female character that's not a typical "sistagirl" reciting all of the Gucci and Versace and her closet. Bates wisely describes clothes and shoes without copping out and letting a designer name suffice for description.

Overall, it's well done. A far better portrayal of upper middle class, educated blacks than what is typically available.

I found the story to be too full of details. Each character was described with more adjectives than I felt necessary. I do hope that the author will continue to write but focus more on the story than every detail of all the surroundings.

Alex Powell is a riot. I laughed so hard at her commentary on all her friends, co-workers and suspects in this wonderful murder mystery. I should warn that in Plain Brown Wrapper the mystery is secondary. It is more of a backdrop for the introduction to a cast of characters that make up the black upper-middle/upper class in Journalism. Alex pokes fun at their little idiosyncrasies but it's never done with contempt which I found very refreshing. There is no doubt that she respects each of these individuals for what they have accomplished and contributed to the world of black journalism but she still doesn't mind giving us a humorous look at what they are all about. She paints them as intelligent, self assured, very comfortable with who they are and not tripping all over themselves to assimilate.

At the annual Black Journalist Convention, Alex's mentor and friend Everette Carson, affectionately know as EV, is murdered. Alex and friend Paul Bates discover his body, in his hotel room and she rather rashly offers the police detective their assistance but retracts the offer after the dirty looks Paul starts giving her. Later the Police have no clues and decide that she and Paul might have more success finding out what happened since the general consensus is that the murderer is probably among the guest attending the conference. So Alex and Paul team up, they have a week to travel around speaking with the most likely suspects.

The dialog is witty, clever, insightful and hilarious. Alex's boss at the paper, A.S. Fine, who she calls "a repressed Jew" with his blond hair, he tries very hard to disengage himself from anything Jewish. Alex constantly takes him to task , for example when he tells her the paper is giving her the week off to help the police: she says "Do I have a say in this, or did you already make the arrangements with the overseer? A. S. sighed. Oh please. Do we have to do the race thing this Morning? she says "If not now, When? If not us who?" You are also going to love Paul who is just as clever as Alex and who is without a doubt a "good brother".

I hope this is a series, I can't wait for the next installment.

This book was slow and boring. The author attempts humor in the main character, but all I got was irritation. I could not finish it, I didnt even get half way through!

I bought this book to begin reading on the way back from a trip. I actually started reading while sitting under a hair dryer. This book is a real page turner and I had to read it. I couldn't wait to finish the book to find out who was the murderer (which I would have never guessed!) and now I'm saddened because I finished the book.

I love "sister sleuth" fiction so I couldn't wait to get this book. After reading this book, I should have waited to borrow it from the library. I think the main character Alex Powell was a good character but the overall story just didn't have enough "kick" to it to make a good mystery. The story was so bad that to this day I don't remember who killed Alex's friend Ev. If this is the beginning of a new mystery series, this is a poor start.

African American female sleuth mysteries have fast become my favorite genre. To me, it gives a little kick to the basic "girl meets guy" fiction. However, I really never felt the kick in "Plain brown rapper". If anything, there was a slight thump towards the end.

I like the character that Karen Grisby Bates has created in Alex Powell. The cool, self-assured, no holds bar persona that she gives off works great for the world of journalists when it comes to getting much needed, highly protected information. What I could of done less with was the oodles of French descriptions and show of status the was pervasive throughout the novel. I do pride myself on being at least somewhat in the know. However, having to have an encyclopedia on the side takes a little something away from my reading pleasure.

When Ev Carson, a big wig publisher of a major Black magazine, is found dead at the Black Journalist's annual convention, his friend Alex is solicited by on of LAPD's finest to use her finess and connections to find the culprit. The character development of the three main suspects, Jake Jackson, Frankie Harper and Chip Wiley was pretty decent. And traveling back & forth from coast to coast was also a fun ride, especially being that I won't be on the Vineyard anytime soon. As for her partner Paul, I think Bates could have also given their budding relationship a bigger kick as well.

All in all it was decent. With this first mystery solved and a new man on the east coast, something tells me the next Alex Powell novel will be a better one.