Customer Reviews

Widow's Watch

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I loved this book. Just gobbled it up. Did not find the characters and plot too untidy. I got these at a yard sale, missing only "Lethal Statues" and prefer the first four to the later three, which got too topical for me.

This book suffers from the author's failure to decide exactly what type of mystery she is writing. At times it reads like a cozy with a large cast of senior citizens, at times it reads like the Southwestern version of Joan Hess' Maggody novels and at times it reads like police procedural. At all times it is just too disorganized and messy.

An elderly neighbor of detective Elena Jarvis' is shot during a daylight robbery while his wife was playing bridge at a local Senior Citizens center. The new widow makes no bones about the fact that she is happy that he was dead. The opinion of her friends was that he was an abusive spouse who had pushed his wife down the stairs and broke her hip during one of his air raid drills. (In preparation for the resurgence of Communism he expected any minute.) Suspicion immediately falls on his son, Lance, who was forbidden the house because he was gay. Additionally the police start taking a good hard look at her two admires, Omar Ashkinazi, a retired rug dealer who makes no secret of his feelings for the widow and T. Bob, a retired rancher who was her dance partner before the injury.

Add to this mix Elena's mother, a former flower child named Harmony, who cannot resist meddling in Elena's life (and any possible political demonstration on offer); Elena's partner who is a tap dancer who decides to organize a Tap Night in the middle of a murder investigation; and Elena's ex-husband who is a potential abuser as well as a few other murders and the poor reader's head swims.

While not downright terrible-- I did finish it, I don't think I would have read it had I known how messy it was. The characters were caricatures (which of itself isn't bad) but the combination of the serious substance matter and the shenanigans of the characters grates. I think this one is for completist fans of the Elena Jarvis series only.