Customer Reviews

Till the Cows Come Home

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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A new kind of sheriff is in town. She's a feisty, shoot-from the hip dairy farmer and she rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. In this engaging, entertaining debut novel, set in rural Pennsylvania, the hard-working folks who supply us with the food we mostly take for granted get their due. Here's a take-no-prisoners woman with real attitude. Stella Crown is her name and she owns a productive dairy farm in Pennsylvania. It's a fresh-air, marginal kind of life, but she loves it, knows her product is important to the nation, and she's not about to give it up anytime soon.

But the vultures are circling in the form of land developers and Stella sees farm after farm among her neighbors being closed down and new homes going up on what was once productive crop lands. New problems arise and Stella finds her own farm the target of a series of mysterious "accidents." In the small nearby town strange illness takes the life of a small boy and several others are oddly sick.

Author Judy Clemens takes a complicated plot, a raft of engaging characters, and an often overlooked setting to craft a fine entertaining novel. She nails the setting and most of the characters. Her protagonist is a fine example of a whole individual, although I thought Stella over-reacted to some situations a bit much at times. She always seems to be slamming and spinning around. It's a small cavil. The pace of this novel, especially in the early going, is just right for its rural setting, and it leaves the author sufficient room to jack things up as we near the climax.

There are suprises and emotion a-plenty in this handsomely packaged mystery. Based on this entry, Judy Clemens is a new author on the block and definitely one to watch.

A sexy, tough dairy farmer with an eye for investigation attacks clues left behind to a farming community struck by plague in Judy Clemens' unusual Till The Cows Come Home. Mystery fans will find plenty to thrill them in this hard-hitting first novel which comes to life with powerful characterization and unusual plots and sub-plots.

I recently first came across this author's work with her sensational Grim Reaper series. I thought, hey these novels would still be really good even without the Grim Reaper in them, as those novels' main character Casey Maldonado is one of the best written female lead characters I've come across. So I decided to check out Clemen's other female character series starting with first of the Stella Crown novels, which was also the author's debut novel, Till the Cows Come Home.

Like with Casey in the Reaper series, Stella Crown is certainly a strong female character. She's a bit more realistic than Casey, although with a few less survival skills, but she makes up for that with hard work while trying to keep her struggling dairy farm going, and out of the hands of a shonky housing estate developer. However someone seems to be sabotaging things on the farm, any doubt that these are just bad luck is shattered with the murder of a bovine resident. Things are only going to get worse if Stella can't work out who's behind these acts of evil. To further complicate things, the local community is also burdened with an illness no one seems to be able to identify let alone stop. The neighbour's kid has just died from the mysterious disease.

I can't remember the last time I read a farm based fiction novel, well one that didn't have talking animals in it, if I've ever read one at all. I wondered if it would work and could keep me interested for up to the final pages and can certainly say that it does. Till the Cows Come Home is the first novel by the author and is written a bit roughly at times. It isn't quite as good as the first Reaper series novel Embrace the Grim Reaper but is still a fun read. One advantage it does have though over the first Reaper novel is that it is a standalone wraps everything up tale, and not a too be continued one. There's plenty of twists and things occuring to keep you interested. I thought I knew who was behind the sabotages on the dairy farm but I was wrong. I'll definitely check out the next book in this series, Three Can Keep a Secret.

Clemens has created a fully dimensional, very believable character in Stella and surrounded her with an excellent supporting cast. She paints a realistic picture of farm life and has structured a solid mystery around it. My only hesitation is that, to me, it seems a bit too structured and a bit predictable. But the overall result is a good, solid, enjoyable first book.

Stella Crown is part of a dying breed - an independent dairy farmer in the age of corporate farming. She is hanging on, as are most of her neighbors, by the proverbial skin of her teeth; the developers are hounding her to sell and the banks are getting more conservative about lending money. Stella is, as one might expect, a very independent woman. She owns a Harley, has several visible tattoos, and can hold her own with most men in a physical or mental brawl.

Stella lives in a very tightly knit community; everyone knows everyone else. So when the kids start getting sick, everyone is concerned. And then one or two kids actually die from this weird flu-like illness. The town gets scared. In the meantime, life of Stella's farm is going badly. One of her cows is electrocuted. Some unusual holes in the manure reservoir spill poop all over the place. A calf is strangled. There is a very physically attractive barn-painter working on her property. The guy Stella has had a low-key crush on most of her life comes back to town with a woman, a perky woman who calls him Abie. The local developer is sending around real estate lawyers to size up her property. Her long-time handyman and trusted family friend, Howie, is acting strange. Are all these things connected? Who, or what, is the link? And why is Stella the target?

TILL THE COWS COME HOME is a very good first mystery. The characters are well developed, even the bad guys and the minor players. Stella is a character who seems like a real person, a person I'd like to know and have as a friend. Not, however, someone I'd want to have mad at me. Her revenge on the developer is a treat to read, unless one identifies with the man. The reader learns a great deal about the nitty-gritty, day-to-day routines of dairy farming, without (mostly, anyway) getting overwhelmed by the detail. The plot - well, while I was reading it, it hung together very well. When I finished the book and thought back, it seemed like an awful lot happened to one person, and some of it, in my opinion, stretched the bounds of credulity. Again, this was in retrospect. While I was reading the book, I kept reading because I really wanted to know what was going to happen next, who the bad guy(s) were, how the multiple love interest conflicts were going to resolve themselves. Clemens is a good enough writer to pull that off - which is impressive in a first novel.

If you enjoy reading about unusual settings, strong female characters, and/or complex plot lines, then you will probably find something to like in TILL THE COWS COME HOME. I look forward to reading more of Clemens' work in the future, although I'm not sure how long a series about a dairy farmer can be sustained. It will be interesting to see what directions Clemens takes from here.

Author Judy Clemens knows what she's doing. TILL THE COWS COME HOME offers an intriguing mystery, a strong yet vulnerable protagonist, and a terrific cast of secondary characters. The rural setting adds a wonderful dimension to the story.

A great story about a great charecter. Judy Clemens Smucker has already mastered the art of story telling and the crafts of misdirection, plot and subplots. I read until midnight to finish this book and look forward to the next.