Review: Not Engaging and No Sleuthing (2.5 stars)
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2013
This novel is being offered as a chick lit mystery and since I do adore most things chick lit I thought I read the first novel in Maddie Cochere's "A Susan Hunter Mystery".Susan Hunter works at a weight loss center and a racquetball club.  While at work she meets an attractive man named Mick who she starts to fall for until she finds out he is married. While trying to sort out her social life she heads out of town to Florida with her next door neighbor and friend Darby.  While in Florida Susan starts to feel as if she is being followed. Entwined with that a co-worker back home unexpectedly dies and Susan starts to suspect murder and the possibility her stalker had something to do with it.Though I love authors that feature the same character in subsequent novels I am going to have to pass on any of Ms. Cochere's novels starring Susan Hunter.  This novel had a lot of issues with it that stopped it from being a great novel.1) Though this is touted as a mystery, there was actually not too much amateur sleuthing going on with Susan until the very end of the novel. Therefore this really shouldn't have been touted as a mystery novel since Susan just finds out about things via phone calls with her friend and what the police tell her.  I was hoping this would be along the line of Elaine Viet's Dead End Job series where the main character ends up at the wrong place and time and ends up investigating to catch a killer.2) Way too much exposition dumping during the first several chapters.  I find that a lot of first time authors do this when trying to set the stage for readers. There needs to be flow to the novel and you don't have to just tell everything about the character all at once. You are supposed to let the reader read and find out more.3) The novel jumped around too much. The story when it starts begins with Susan being upset about when she finds out Mick is married, then backtracks to there first couple of dates and you find out they have been dating for a couple of months. Then the novel talks about her two jobs, her training for racquetball, her parents. It was hard to follow what was going on.4) There was way too much explanation of the clothing that the characters's were wearing. I think that initially when we had Susan explaining what she was wearing when she met Mick was important since later in the novel you find out that was what drew Mick to Susan. However, after that it got to be a bit too much. The author constantly is explaining what people are wearing down from the tops of their heads to their shoes. I wanted more descriptions of people and settings. Due to the unevenness in explanation often times the novel felt too flat.5) The ending also made no sense. When we do get to the ending of the novel and you find out about Susan's stalker and how it ties in with her co-worker's death I thought the whole thing was a bit far-fetched.I do want to say that the author did not have any grammatical issues in their writing. I also really did like the parts when Ms. Cochere describes racquetball and the moves that Susan was doing when she was playing. I found that way more interesting than anything else that was going on in the novel. It's pretty obvious that Ms. Cochere has experience playing or watching racquetball so those parts of the novel definitely rang true to me.Ultimately in the end, I  just felt that this novel was so-so and that it really did not capture my attention and that I would not recommend it to other readers.