Review: Nice story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 30, 2013
Ink Red Dead (a Kiki Lowenstein mystery)By Joanna Campbell SlanThis was a delightful story featuring a heroine well known to all of us in today’s mysteries – single woman (either never married, recently divorced or widowed, sometimes with a child, sometimes without), who manages to get herself into amazing situations without even trying.  Still, Slan’s character is likeable and manages to separate herself from the crowd of current day heroines.Kiki Lowenstein is a widow with a young daughter, who lives in Richmond Heights, just outside of St. Louis. She is struggling to make ends meet, to rebuild her life, and to provide for her daughter.  In this, the third in the series, Kiki is working at Time In A Bottle, a scrapbooking store in which she has a small, minority ownership share.  She also picks up extra cash working for her friend Mert’s cleaning business.  In this book, she gets to do both.The daughter of the Time In A Bottle majority owners has dropped out of college, and her parents make her store manager.  Against, Kiki’s advice, she sets up in-home scrapbooking parties, which Kiki and her co-worker, Clancy, run in clients’ homes.  When they arrive to help set up for one such party, they discover the homeowner, although living in an upscale neighborhood, has allowed her house and grounds to deteriorate.  It’s hot, and a trip around the house turns up no information as to why the homeowner isn’t answering her doorbell.  When Kiki finally gets the front door open, the smell is overpowering – cats are everywhere!  Kiki braves the unbelievable mess and smell inside the house and finds the homeowner in her bedroom, near death.  Kiki calls 911.  After the paramedics, police and animal control have finished their work, Kiki joins her friend Mert’s cleaning crew to reclaim this home from years of neglect.It seems a pretty cut and dry case of hoarding, until they find the body in the freezer.So, was this a case of the crazy cat lady becoming overwhelmed by her own problem? Or did someone else attempt to silence her and frame her for murder?Slan’s writing style is enjoyable.  The story is told in first person, from Kiki’s POV.  Her characters are fully fleshed out and you either like them or dislike them immediately.  The situations are believable; things you could see happening in real life.  Her prose is well done with wonderful turns of phrase and lots of humor.  The early part of the story features a couple of well-defined flashbacks.  You know – like you expect to see on a TV show that starts with an event and then this flashes on the screen: “6 hours earlier.”  Her chapters don’t all have headings, but when they do, they tend to relate to the timeline, giving the reader information on where, from the original scene, the action is taking place.  For instance, the first chapter (position 41 on my Kindle) heading is “Mid-August/LaDue, Missouri, Early Thursday morning…”  Other chapter headings are Chapter 2, (80 on the Kndle) “One hour earlier…,” Chapter 18 (886 on my Kindle) “Late evening after discovering the mess at Marla’s,” and Chapter 19 (894) “Friday/one day after discovering the mess at Marla’s.”  I’d not seen this type of chapter heading before, but I found it neither particularly helpful nor distracting, just mildly interesting.It was certainly a quick read.  I started the book on Oct. 26th and finished it Sunday night, Oct. 27th.  I think I read somewhere that this was a novella – but then I also read somewhere that this was the first book in the series, but according to the author, it’s the third book in a 9 book series.  It looks like it might have been written in either 2008 or 9, but revised this year (2013).  I’m holding out on believing that it’s been revised --- and the reasons for that will come later.I want to stress again that I enjoyed this read.  I found the writer’s style to be interesting and fun.  I found the characterizations to be nicely done.  I liked the way the author moved the plot forward and how the action kept me engaged.  I would have liked to have given it 4, maybe even 5 stars.I also loved the extras at the end of the book:  Kiki Lowenstein’s Craft Projects, Kiki Lowenstein’s Best Pet Album ideas, Kiki Lowenstein’s Fun, Cheap and Fast Album Idea, Kiki Lowenstein’s Ideas for using Zentangle Inspired Designs, Marla Husovsky’s Frito Pie Casserole, Candi Bise’s Lemon Curd Cupcake recipe, Rebekkah’s Pumpkin Cookies,  -- great fun!  And on the strength of this alone, I’ll probably recommend the book to a couple of my scrapbooking friends!So, if I liked it so much why didn’t I rate it higher?If you follow my reviews on Goodreads, I’m betting you already know the answer:  bad proofreading and editing.  And yes, what follows is why I’m having trouble believing the book was revised in 2013 and I’m wondering what it was like before if what I’m listing here still exists.  Also, we’ve come to why I rated this a 3 star, rather than a 4 or 5 star read.As I usually do with an author who is new to me, I visited Slan’s website:  [...].  This is not an inexperienced author.  The Kiki Lowenstein series has 9 books and some short stories existing, plus the 10th book will be out in 2014.  The Jane Eyre Chronicles series has a couple of books in it.  The Southern Beauty Shop Mystery series has 4 books in it (written evidently under the name Lila Dare).  Plus Slan is about to launch a new series, the Cara Mia Delgatto series, in November of 2013.  She also has some other books, including scrapbooking books, inspirational books, and a how to about letter writing.  So, I see no reason why there should be poor proofreading and editing in a newly revised novel.Near the beginning, Kiki’s landlord is leaving town and has Kiki dog sit his Pug, Petunia (about 919 on my Kindle).  Kiki has a Great Dane named Gracie.  (I would have loved to see more interaction between these Mutt and Jeff canine characters, by the way.)  When she goes to work, she takes the dogs with her, but there is no mention of Petunia when she gets to the shop, just Gracie (939):  “After putting Gracie in the doggy playpen, I set aside my purse and my lunchbox.”  So, where is Petunia?  Did she leave him (yes, him) in the car?  There was no mention of making a stop along the way, other than to drop her daughter off for day camp.  Also, Petunia is not mentioned again from the time he is loaded in the car at 927, until position 1339, when he suddenly reappears at Kiki’s house.  Where has he been all this time?At 2326, once again, only Gracie is mentioned being put in the pen at work.  Petunia is again not mentioned.  But, finally, at 3287, Petunia actually shows up at work and is clearly shown being put into the doggie playpen.Yes, it’s nit-picky since the dogs are not real players in the plot, but it bothered me that Kiki was supposed to be caring for this dog throughout the story, yet, even when Gracie does appear, often Petunia mysteriously is missing.  As a pet owner, it was something I picked up on.  Like misused words (to come), it takes me out of the action when I stop to wonder what happened to that little dog.  A good editor and proofreader should have picked up on these omissions.There were other, more evident mistakes that should have been picked up by Slan’s proofreader or editor.  At 1401, Mert says:  “But we won’t remove it from the premises until you say so.  That way you can you sort through it.”  Two occurrences of the word “you,” probably due to a rewrite of the original sentence and not caught on proofreading.At 1455, Kiki is thinking about a stalking problem she may have:  “Once I came home to a bloody mess on my porch, a clear warning that the killer hadn’t forgotten about me.”  What she is referring to was never really explained.  I’m assuming that the stalking or harassment reference comes from one of the two previous books in the series, as I know her husband was murdered and his killer not captured, so I can figure out that is the killer she refers to.  However, the “bloody mess” isn’t set out, nor are any other instances of harassment, leaving me wondering what that was all about.  Yep, stopped my immersion in the story and I hate that.At position 1687 is this sentence: “These were labeled with the name of each scrapbooker on the end where it could easily been seen when the containers were stacked in alphabetical order.”  Oh, I have so much to say about this sentence!  First, “been seen?”  I think she meant “be seen.”  And, of course “could been(sic) seen” is an infinitive, so the “easily” should have come either before the “could” or after the “seen.” Yes, I know split infinitives aren’t a big deal in today’s grammar world, but it jumped out at me.  And finally, so the labels only are seen easily when the boxes were stacked in alphabetical order?  Again, one of those little nit-picky things that make me crazy.  “…easily could be found…” would have said it better, as surely the labels were as seeable when stacked randomly as when stacked alphabetically, but might be a little harder to find.While Kiki is working with Mert’s crew to clear and clean Marla’s home, Mert asks Kiki to pack up Marla’s deceased child’s room.  The child has been deceased for a long time and Marla has kept the room in pristine condition, just as it was the last time he was in it.  As a mother of a young child, this is a disturbing task for Kiki.  She says this:  “I hated her to asking me to do that.”  Again, a good proofreader should have seen the “to” where “for” should be.  This little mistake, that takes the reader out of the action, also spoils a very poignant moment in the narration.At 2826, we find this:  “Touching all this symbols of a boy’s inner life had set my internal clock to ticking.”  Again, Kiki is referring to packing up the deceased child’s room.  That little mistake of “this” instead of “these,” again spoils a very poignant moment.At 3100, when talking about the possibility that the packaged meat found in the freezer was venison, and might have internal parasites, Kiki says:  “She gets her cat back, and she realized that he’s been eating deer meet.  If they were parasites, and her vet noticed them…”  I’m pretty sure she meant, “If there were parasites, and her vet noticed them…”At 3222, after a long and nearly sleepless night, Kiki says this:  “I didn’t want to climb back into bed and surrender to sleep, to a place where I couldn’t control my thoughts.  Instead, even though it was really, really early, I showered and dressed for my job at the scrapbook store.”  This was very confusing.  Her home had been vandalized, she was sleeping at her mother-in-law’s home, had been having nightmares, been up pacing most of the night.  So, did she really mean she did not want to “go back to bed and surrender to sleep, to a place where she couldn’t control her thoughts?”  If so, why the “Instead,” to start the next sentence?  Or did she mean she wanted to get lost in sleep?  Doesn’t really make a difference, as once again this wording threw me out of the action as I pondered what was meant.I often get asked why these things bother me so much – and if you’ve read this or other of my reviews closely, you’ve seen me say this before:  because it takes the reader out of the action.  It spoils the flow.  It makes the reader realize she is just reading words on a page, not living an adventure.  I read for fun.  Trying to figure out whether the syntax or grammar or spelling or word usage is correct is not fun.  This was a revised edition?To wrap up, part of me loves this book and wants to let the world know about it.  Another part of me is really struggling with whether I want to take a chance and read more books in this series, a series I desperately want to like, just to be disappointed by finding the same type of problems once again.