Review: Down-home Small Town Life-Or everybody knows everybody else' business!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 18, 2013
The author has the knack of describing small town life down to minuscule details. From folks gathering at R&J;'s diner to eat while gossiping to Sunday church functions, Charlotte Moore nails all of the everyday activities of small town life. Also, there is a titillating array of sex, lies, and gossip as well as the affairs and cheating going on behind the scenes.The main character, Hunter Jones is a writer/reporter, and a transplant from elsewhere,for the small town newspaper and privy to investigations thanks to also being good friends with all of the members of the small police department.The characters are well drawn so that the reader can "see" them quite clearly. This allows one to understand the motivations behind the characters' action while finding the actions believable and totally within character. For that matter, the characters are ones that you see everyday in a small town. Ones that you 'know and love' or 'know and hate' but you know them all because they make up every small town. In this type of small town if you forget what you did the other day you just ask a neighbor because they all know what you did too, sometimes better than you yourself!While there are several suspects during the investigation the author does a decent job of obfuscation and she keeps you thinking about "whodunit". There are also several smaller points of interest solved at the end which wrap up the conclusion quite well.In terms of grammar and mechanics the grammar has no problems. The mechanics have several errors in terms of omitted words or words in the wrong order in the sentence but this is not enough of a distraction to make you want to stop reading. The format flowed well with the characters speaking in third person with the exception of the main character, Hunter, using an italicized font (written as an email format to her best friends) to provide additional info to the reader through the course of the narrative. However, due to having initially missed the fact that Hunter is writing an email to her good friend who is elsewhere it seems as if the italicized section was Hunter doing some self-reflection about the information she has to that time.Being from the South the title was an instant attention-getter. The book describes small town life in the South very well along with the usual cast of expected characters while laying out a very interesting mystery that ends in a satisfying note.I would definitely read more in the Hunter Jones series. She is an interesting character with just the right amount of believability when helping the sheriff and his folks solve crimes. Thanks to Hunter being a newspaper reporter the reader can accept that she will dig out the story and investigate the story to the point of helping solve local crime.If you like mysteries with interesting quirky characters as well as small town Southern living then the Hunter Jones series by Charlotte Moore is for you. Definitely five-star with no qualifications.