Review: Misses A Few Toppings to Make it a Satisfying Reading Meal
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 14, 2013
Murder With the Lot passes the time but it's missing a lot of the stuff needed to be a great read.  The main meat of the story, the main character Cass Tulpin, isn't the brightest person you'll ever meet. She's also quite annoying and someone you get sick of pretty early on which makes wanting to hear her narrate the story to the end a bit of an effort.  Sure dim-witted characters have told the tale of many a fun novel, Gump (Forrest Gump), Odell Deefus (Calisto), to name but two, but they have been likeable and interesting.  Cass isn't either of those things.  She's nosey, opinionated and lacks a partner like Max Well Smart's 99, or a niece or dog with a watch like Inspector Gadget's Penny and Brain to help get her out the jam she has found herself or solve the problem for her.  Cass runs a milk bar in a town where the glory days of deep frying chiko rolls, hot chips, a piece of fish, or grilling up a thick juicy hamburger for a living have pretty much died out with the town's dwindling population and the loss of passing traffic and tourists.  Still she persists as it's where she calls home, and as is obvious to the reader she likely wouldn't get a job anywhere else.So when a mysterious customer with a dripping wound enters her shop and orders a burger with the lot she's happy for the business.  When he asks if she knows a place he can hide out she is more than happy to accept his five grand and rent a vacant isolated cabin belonging to a friend.  It's only after he leaves that it dawns on her, her friend's new tenant might not be a guy just looking for some peace and quiet, and the money in her possession not something her friend may be willing to have in exchange for a criminal or mob related person staying at his cabin. Not being bright enough to realise the guy would at the very least have rights as a tenant, she decides after thinking about it, she'll just go turf him out tomorrow and give him back his money.  However a dead body, which seems to have gotten up and walked away after a sandstorm forces her to take shelter and some intimidating men who claim to be visiting city cops make that plan a bit difficult.  Cass's son is the local town's only policeman but he's sick of her crying wolf, she's already got him into trouble by claiming her only other takeaway shop competitor was dead, when after he called it in it was discovered he was just asleep, among many other embarrassing false reports of crimes due to her paranoid overimaginative mind.The other key ingredient Murder With the Lot misses is a bit of editing.  The story jumps to the next bit of the scene without linking it, over and over again.  For example when the customer asks if she knows somewhere secluded he can hang out and not be seen she thinks of her friend's cabin but never actually mentions this to him but yet the next sentences has him giving her the money.It's a readable book but it's just not a satisfactory enjoyable meal of a read.