Customer Reviews

Who's Grace? (John Smyth Mystery Series #1)

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Here's a new one, a Christian Murder Mystery set in Vancouver, written by a Canadian author named James R. Coggins.

John Smyth a magazine editor coming back from a conference looks down while the plane starts it's descent and believes he sees a murder occurring.


Once on the ground, he reports the sighting to the RCMP. Not taking him seriously they push it off as jet lag or him just seeing things. Until two weeks later when the body of a girl with the only identifying thing on her body is a necklace with a pendent on it. The pendent has the word Grace etched in to it. The connection to John Smyth?

The magazine he edits is called Grace magazine.


While trying to clear his name, John begins to talk to his pastor friends, they in turn talk to others and a list is formed of possible missing persons. Eventually the truth is found out.... But the outcome? I cannot tell. You'll have to read the book.

I do agree with the reviewer who spoke of the book being confusing as it moved between scenes w/o warning -- nothing to break off from one scene to the next.

Imagine, if you will, being on an airplane at a distance where plots of land are matchbook-size and people are matchstick-size figures. You are quite tired as you peer out your window of the plane and see what appears to be one matchstick figure aiming an object at another figure, the second figure, limbs jerking then falling, mouth agape. You then look around inside the plane to the other passengers to see if anyone else might have seen what you just have or perhaps it's just your very tired mind. That's what happened to John Smyth, the main character in "Who's Grace."

She's been identified as 3 different women - Grace Drummond, Gary's wife. Grace -- a prostitute. Grace Hutchinson -- another Grace who's been missing.

John Smyth who saw what he saw from the airplane, is being questioned as though he was a suspect. David, the street person is being questioned as though he was suspect. Gary Drummond is being questioned as though he was the guilty party.

This book really frustrated me. The idea was good, the writing was pretty good, but I still didn't enjoy it. First of all, Coggins spends too much time cutting back and forth from one scene to another. There is a difference between being surprised and being confused. You would be reading one situation with some characters and then, without warning, you're in a completely different situation. If the characters had been well-defined, that would not have been a problem, but they were not. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was doing what.

The characters were one-dimensional. There was no depth to them, and that made it difficult to sympathize with them. All the non-Christians use stereotypes to refer to the main character, John Smyth. But by not developing the characters, Coggins is the one who trivializes Christians. There is a femi-nazi in the book who actually makes libelous statements at a public rally. One would think that a person in her position (the leader of an anti-domestic violence group) would have more sense. In fact, if she had been written with some depth, rather than relying on cookie-cutter stereotypes, the book would have been more interesting.

She was not the only poorly written character. The two main police officers cannot be civil to each other to save their lives. Again, their animosity was oversimplified. And the list of bad characters goes on and on. There's the head of the mission who shares a prayer request with a creepy reporter and a Pastor and his wife who evangelize every person the meet, and so on.

I won't get into how the murder is solved, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone who still wants to read this book. But suffice it to say, I was disappointed. If I was not the type of person who pretty much always finishes a novel that I start, I would not have read this book to the end.