A Cozy Mystery for the Minnesota Winters? Well, They Need the Warmth...
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
|
Author: Jeff Shelby
Title: The Murder Pit Genre: cozy homeschooler mystery Everything was going great for Daisy Savage: husband number two, Jake, was darned near perfect (and luscious); three of the couple’s blended-family kids were thriving under her homeschooling chopsband the family had moved into her dream house: a century-old Victorian with “character.” It also had frozen pipes, unfortunately, and in the process of thawing them out Daisy found a body stashed in the coal chute they didn’t even know they had. Worse, Daisy had dated the victim between husbands, which seemed… suspicious to everyone in the little town of Moose River, Minnesota. Protestations aside, the locals already had her convicted of bumping off poor Olaf Stunderson. Not least among Daisy’s detractors were Olaf’s sister, Olga, and his former wife Helen – but everyone else seemed convinced that she was a killer. All the suspicion meant that Daisy’s comfortable life and the lives of her kids were in the dumper. Daisy, however, would do what she’s gotta do, and that’s to catch the killer. Of course, that’s only if the killer doesn’t catch her first… The Murder Pit is the first in the “Moose River Mystery” series penned by Jeff Shelby. Other installments include The Last Resort and Alibi High, all three churned out in less than a year. The series is intended to intersect “cozy” with “humorous.” As far as characters go, Shelby more or less gets it right, although the humor means that everyone is rather saccharine. One irritating point is Shelby’s apparent mission of preaching the advantages of homeschooling (note to Jeff: not all homeschooling moms are paragons of education). No big deal: plenty of authors preach their convictions, and most of the time the authors and the causes are more obnoxious. But perhaps he should have spent more time on the writing and less on the proselytizing: The Murder Pit definitely needs some help in the areas of plotting and logic. Plotwise, every mystery reader knows that the killer must appear early in the plot as a seemingly benign character. Shelby’s provided a single candidate beyond the two women, obvious red herrings. That means that the villain’s identity is obvious from the second time s/he wanders into the scenery. Most telling, the victim had been stashed in a place that even the homeowners didn’t know existed (not a very likely situation, IYAM) – so how did the killer know it was there? And why didn’t Daisy catch on to this until page almost 90% of the way through the book? It occurred to me about six words after the body was found! I also wondered why the cops never asked that question… As for logical problems, there’s Jake applying mortar to a concrete block wall to patch a hole – masonry work in the middle of a Minnesota winter? I don’t think so. Plus the scene where a detective blithely “pops off a piece of siding” to get to the coal chute? I had to wonder whether Shelby knows what a coal chute is – or siding, for that matter. I won’t even go into the problem of calling a room twelve feet on a side a “chute” or why anyone would put a coal bin in a part of the basement you couldn’t reach without crawling through a 3-foot high space. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Although cozy mysteries aren’t generally known for their depth, The Murder Pit is even shallower than most. If the characters were less likeable, it’d plummet to the real of a single star. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
|