David Hughes reviewed Homicide in hardcover by Kate Carlisle
Formulaic fungible fluff
1 star
Brooklyn Wainwright is a book restorer who is first to find the body of her murdered mentor. Can she solve the murder before she's arrested? Of course she can! This was awful. There's so much wrong with it, it's difficult to know where to begin. Book repair is library adjacent so I was curious to read this. Alas! I wager the author has a degree in book preservation from the University of Google where the course teaches that you can eat and drink around rare materials. Before the book starts, the heroine has obviously been on the head many times by a hammer, the only way I can explain her stupidity. Nominally a mystery, providing you define a mystery as a novel in which there's a murder after which the heroine runs around aimlessly, faints a lot and eventually confronts the murderer. Clues? Deduction? Logic? Look elsewhere, dear reader. The …
Brooklyn Wainwright is a book restorer who is first to find the body of her murdered mentor. Can she solve the murder before she's arrested? Of course she can! This was awful. There's so much wrong with it, it's difficult to know where to begin. Book repair is library adjacent so I was curious to read this. Alas! I wager the author has a degree in book preservation from the University of Google where the course teaches that you can eat and drink around rare materials. Before the book starts, the heroine has obviously been on the head many times by a hammer, the only way I can explain her stupidity. Nominally a mystery, providing you define a mystery as a novel in which there's a murder after which the heroine runs around aimlessly, faints a lot and eventually confronts the murderer. Clues? Deduction? Logic? Look elsewhere, dear reader. The kind of book where characters don't drink wine, they drink "the 2004 Concannon Petite Syrah" Also, don't get me started on the "the humorless--and annoyingly attractive--British security officer" replete with "British accent". Ok, this is a first novel, and obviously as the first of a series (Jesus Suffering Christ: there's 17 of them) there's a lot of front-loading going on, but no. Probably took longer to read than to write. The epilogue suggests the next novel is set in Edinburgh. For the sake of my sanity, I'll avoid that and anything else by this author.