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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well Worth the Wait, June 16, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I have been anxiously waiting for another Hazel Micallef book--after falling completely in love with Hazel in her first outing, The Calling. And, happily, author Inger Ash Wolfe lives up to the standard she set with that first book. The characters, as before, are rich and round; the plot is complex and unpredictable; the humor is natural to the characters and never for a moment feels forced. This is writing and plotting of the highest order. And even the secondary characters are fully developed. I am not going to give a plot summary--that's available in the product description. What I am going to do is encourage everyone to get to know Hazel; she's addictive. She's an actual adult and a parent, with all the fears and foibles, tics and heartaches and, finally, acceptance that go along with the accumulation of years of living. Highly recommended!
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Taken with This Book, August 12, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is Wolfe's second novel featuring DI Hazel Micallef. Micallef, who has recently had back surgery and must temporarily move into her ex-husband's basement to recuperate. The police are called to a local lake where a body has been reported found. From that point, the story begins to develop.
Rather than the author giving the reader key information, it seems that she has assumed that everyone has read the first book where, hopefully, she explicitly tells the reader where the book is set, why Micallef needed back surgery, what motivated her to move in with her ex-husband and his new wife, etc.
There were a plethora of scenes that stopped my reading, for instance, introducing minor characters, but not giving enough information about them so that when she reintroduces them later, the reader is left wondering who these people are. Or having Micallef confined to bed only to jump up a few pages later and rush out of the house to go to a crime scene. Or the one that really stopped me cold was Micallef getting into the bath tub by herself, having her husband appear with her dinner and feeding it to her while she sits in the tub and then she purposely drops a greasy rib into her bath water.
I think some of the problem I had with this book was that the story line was implausible. Here is a 62-year-old woman who has only just had major back surgery (and still has stitches in) getting out of bed to go to crime scene. Surely, her recovery time would be longer - much longer. Add to all this, the author throws in my pet peeve: a supposedly intelligent cop goes into a potential suspect's home alone and, in this case, goes into a dark basement with him and then remains in the basement while he goes back upstairs.
I wanted to like this book. It has everything that would make me like it - a mature woman detective, an interesting sounding plot, and starred reviews. But I felt no connection to any of the characters and the story moved so slowly that it was hard to stay engaged, in fact, my mind wandered to other matters, like my grocery list, as I read it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great encore in a fab new series, October 10, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This second novel in the series of mysteries featuring Hazel Micallef, a rural Ontario police chief, is one of those rare discoveries -- a mystery series that really grabs me and has me completely believing that the cast of characters the author crafts aren't fictional inventions but real people.
Hazel Micallef is recovering from her pursuit of a very odd kind of killer in the first book ( The Calling), literally. She's flat on her back, after back surgery, in the basement spare bedroom of the house she and her aged mother are forced to share temporarily with her ex-husband and his new wife until she's well enough to go back home. She's in agony, which only Percocet helps deal with, and she's bored out of her wits. So she is almost grateful when reports of a body found in a lake by fishermen force her back into the office. Until the body turns out not to be a body, but the first clue in a manipulative game being staged by someone bent on murder -- or is it revenge? Whatever the case, Hazel and her team are the criminal's tools.
I loved the characters, the writing, the author's ability to communicate a setting, and the deeply twisting (and twisted) plot of this novel that had me turning the pages more and more rapidly. I particularly enjoy Hazel, who is ruthlessly honest with the world -- to her own detriment, sometimes -- but also with herself. As she tells her sidekick, the equally appealing James Wingate, she has "a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on my desk, a CO who thinks I've outlived my usefulness and expensive gifts coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem ... So I'm slightly less than OK." In other words, she is human, flawed and thus appealing in a way that a glam 30-something detective just couldn't be.
Ultimately, this crime novel ends up being about love -- and the price of love and what people will do in the name of love. This is an intriguing mix of the cosy setting (rural Ontario, where the usual crimes run to someone throwing a cup of hot Darjeeling at someone else) with a gritty crime and deeply nasty criminal. Highly recommended; I can't wait for the next in this series and hope that Hazel has a long crime-solving career ahead of her.
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