Review: Good Romantic Mystery
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 6, 2012
Not for the purpose of making a judgment of quality but as a question of providing guidance for readers, I pondered whether this was a Romance using the mystery to provide a scaffolding for the plot or a Mystery with a Romantic sub-plot. My conclusion:  despite the prominence of the mystery element, it really never has the elements of suspense, inducement for reader emotional involvement, or other components of a true amateur detective mystery. Can't support this with chapter and verse without revealing more of the story than I should, but, for those who read it, I would refer to the sequence involving her friend John wherein what could have been made a full mystery is, no doubt deliberately, thrown away.  Another issue that confronted me, again, not a matter of judging readability, was whether this could legitimately be called a Woman's Book, referring not to who wrote it, but for which audience  the book is primarily intended (the other sex welcome). Here we have a practical consideration for an author and publisher. Woman are the primary consumers for all fiction; men, on the other hand, tend to lean heavily toward non-fiction. This means that  fiction without, if you will, sex appeal for woman, is less likely to sell well, than does fiction with more appeal to the male outlook. In this case, and, of course, I have no idea of what the actual intention of the author was, the book is almost entirely female oriented. This does not mean men will not enjoy it, it does mean that women are more likely to take strongly to it.This is another of those books in which the motivation of the heroine (or hero when that is the case) is never made reasonable as a literary matter ( we can accept the most unreal things in books if they are made to seem real in context of the book). In this case, the author does not take up the chance her text offers her to make quite reasonable the mystery-solving efforts of her heroine (she being part of a television news service, albeit a minor on-air special features presenter),but sloughs it off with the "that's the way I am" argument.Having said all this, which may seem to some (many or all) readers irrelevant, what about the appeal of the book. It should be quite satisfying to the many readers of the numerousother novels falling into the categories I have mentioned. The author writes well, she gives us a good cast of feature players to interact positively with the heroine, much less well drawn villains and villain's henchmen. The heroine, insecure, overmuch given to tears, naive to a fault, nevertheless is appealing though (perhaps very realistically) clearly beyond the ability of any mere male's understanding. Her mood swings are dizzying, her incapacity to learn from experience considerable.This book provides a firm foundation for the others already available in the series (which I have not read). At the current99 cent price, it is a bargain. The others the series are somewhat higher but would seem to be worth getting now if you are a fan of romance-mysteries.