Reader's Reviews
***
I repeatedly struggled with whether to keep reading this book. The characters are very shallow (perky women, mysterious men with deep dark pasts, teenagers who can't decide what they want, etc.) The main character sustains major injuries yet blows them off and flounces on. A huge storm threatens out to sea throughout the book, but never arrives. Paranoia reigns and people are not what they seem. Repeatedly someone walks in the door just as the main character thinks of them or wants to ask them a question.
I never cared, and I finished the book with relief, and regret for wasted time.
***
This is the first I've read in the "Home Repair Is Homicide" series. And it will be the last. The characters never come alive, the plot is contrived. The sleuths leap from one improbable conclusion to another. And the writing? Consider that, on pp. 150-151 a single character "snapped," "sneered," "declaimed angrily," "fulminated," "yelled" (twice), "shouted," and finally "expostulated." The verb "said" does not appear to be one Graves is familiar with.
***
This is the first book I've read by Sarah Graves and I'm not having a good time. I love the jokes, it has good humor, but I'm having the hardest time keeping everyone straight.
I'm not sure if it's just my reading and lack of understanding but somehow I'm finding that one minute we're daytime in the hospital and the next we're night time in another town and I don't know how we got there. I'm also having a hard time keeping the characters straight as to who does what, when, where, why and who.
It's probably just me, but this is one of the most frustrating books I've ever read.
***
Jessica is taking a leisurely three-day journey on a classic train, the historic Whistler Northwind, with members of the Track and Rail Club through much of British Columbia. She was invited by her friend Reggie Weems who is one of the Vice Presidents of the club. The trip begins and ends in Vancouver, one of her favorite cities.
Not into the trip, Al Blevin, the club's president, goes into convulsions and dies after taking a sip of a Bloody Mary. Immediately Jessica suspects strychnine poisoning. Al's wife Theodora tells Jessica emphatically to stop talking about it being poisoning. She said he had heart failure.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detective Marshall asks Reggie and Jessica to keep their ears and eyes open and report back to him with any information they get.
Theodora's son, Benjamin, follows Jessica up Whistler Mountain and tells her to "butt out!" She has some accidents and other encounters along the way.
Plus there's the mysterious disappearance of Theodora's previous husband, Elliott Vail. He disappeared on that very train three years ago. Everyone believes he jumped, but his body was never found. Jessica wonders if there is any correlation to Al's death.
Al was not well liked, so there is a plethora of suspects. Plus there is plenty of trouble in his past to add to the suspect list. Can they figure out who did it and why before the end of the trip and everyone heads home and without Jessica finding herself in peril?
After watching so many years of Murder, She Wrote on television, I can "see" the characters acting out the book as I read it. It is a lot of fun and so easy to read.
I especially enjoyed this book with it being set on such a wonderful train trip. The scenery was wonderful. I highly recommend this book.
***
I am not impressed. That pretty much says it. This book was very light reading, you could blow it away like a dandelion. I like my books with more heft to them. There was not enough characterization�the people came across as being cardboard. Graves means well as a writer, she�s picked an area which no one else has, concerning a woman and her friends who get involved in mysteries through their home repair. That�s very strange to say the least, but there are other mystery writers out there who use cats, who do catering (which leads to trouble), etc. So I guess a book using home repair as a catalyst for crime is not any more farfetched then the other things.
This book was so uninteresting to me, that every time I picked it up to finish reading it, I couldn�t remember the plot line or the characters, and I�d have to read back a bit to remember what it was about. I know my memory is shot sometimes, but it isn�t that bad, and I don�t have that problem with other books! Karen Sadler
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