![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
More mystery-solving ghosts.
I posted a while back (in 2020, as it turns out) about a series of cozy mysteries (starting with Mrs. Morris and the Ghost) involving a B&B-owning widow and a mystery-solving ghost who have EXACTLY the Jack-Peggy dynamic from Agent Carter, but minus the sexism on his end. He's a handsome, flirty ghost who fake-lounges around on furniture and runs his cold poltergeist fingers down the back of her neck to tease her while there are other people in the room so she can't acknowledge him, and she rushes home every day in order to share with him the latest clues in the mysteries she's solving.
It occurred to me recently that there were probably more books in the series I haven't read yet, so I picked up the latest ones (#3-5).
As noted in the previous review, the actual murder mysteries aren't really these books' strong points, but #3 was pretty good - in large part because the nature of the murder (a hit and run) wasn't obviously a murder rather than an accident, so there was no particular reason for the police to put a lot of effort into investigating it, or for the heroine to believe she would be in danger for investigating it. Both of which I feel are necessary for a cozy mystery to provide decent suspension of disbelief: the murder has to be ridiculous or obscure or both, and you need a good reason for the amateur sleuth to run around investigating things without looking like a lunatic, such as having a believable reason why it isn't going to be investigated as a murder, or the victim isn't someone who the authorities believe deserves justice, etc.
The Charlene-Jack interactions continue to be absolutely adorable and BY FAR my favorite thing about these books. She films community events on her phone and brings them home to make him feel included since he can't leave the house! They watch ghost documentaries together for "research"! He tucks blankets around her when his ghostly presence chills the room! At one point he shows up in a sweater with snowflakes in his hair and she asks if he's been playing in the snow, and he has, indeed, been playing in the snow. They have an incredibly charged, flirty, fun dynamic with both of them clearly enjoying the heck out of each other's company, and she has 1000% more chemistry with the ghost than she does with her alleged love interest, the local detective, who mostly just scolds her for going near crime scenes.
So the third book was fun, and then I got to the fourth one, which I finished last night, and mainly powered through for the Jack-Peggy Charlene scenes. It was not only one of the worst murder mystery resolutions I've ever read (more on that in a minute) but the entire plot was run on Crab Nebula logic, in the sense that a lot of the characters' decisions and reactions were simply not how human beings react to things.
I can give you an excellent demonstration of this with the murder scene.
The victim, Madison, is a community theater actress who is spoiled, obnoxious, and universally hated, thus making every person she's ever interacted with a potential suspect, in classic cozy mystery style. She is shot during a Fourth of July reenactment of an American Revolution scene involving fake guns. But she really falls down, and everyone realizes immediately that someone shot her from the crowd.
As well as being in poor taste given real life mass shootings, everyone reacts to this in a way that makes more sense for the actress collapsing from a heart attack than someone in the crowd shooting at her.
No one in this scene panics, hides, or acts like calling the police is a big priority. In fact, the person who calls the police is Charlene, calling her detective friend in a way that's more of a personal "hey, just wanted to let you know", as opposed to a dozen people frantically calling 911. No one acts like they feel like they're in danger. No one, INCLUDING THE POLICE, tries to lock down the area or stop people from wandering in and out. In fact, several of the main suspects immediately disappear on their own errands and no one seems to care. No one seems that upset or traumatized by having just witnessed someone being shot in front of them. The hit and run scene in the previous book was a lot more realistic in terms of the witnesses being genuinely panicked and upset!
I genuinely don't know, and I still don't know, why the author went with this murder method instead of one of 1000 less conspicuous and less triggering murder methods, especially since there's never any question that Madison was shot with a real gun from the crowd and not one of the fake guns, which means there's no purpose to doing it onstage at all. The fake guns don't even fire blanks, so they don't even make noise to cover up a gunshot. And it's literally the most public way that you could possibly murder someone. There's a lampshading later on when the heroine contemplates how there are a bunch of ways to kill someone in a theater and make it look like an accident, but she never goes ahead and theorizes why someone would pick a far riskier and more public method (other than just to muse that the killer must really have wanted people to know Madison was murdered - BUT WHY?!!).
So that didn't get us off to a very good start, and then the heroine proceeds to spend the rest of the book investigating in spite of the police telling her not to, and blithely inserting herself into scenes full of suspects in a similar way to the previous book, except in this case SHE KNOWS there's someone running around with a gun who's already killed once! In a way this is the polar opposite of the previous book, in which there was no particular reason for the police to treat the killing as a priority or even believe it was premeditated, leaving the field wide open for Charlene to investigate with relative impunity. In this case, however, someone was shot at a very public Fourth of July celebration in a community park, and that someone was a young, white, wealthy, well-connected actress, so OF COURSE the police are going to investigate this, and all Charlene is going to do is trip over them right and left in the course of a largely unnecessary personal investigation into someone who, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, she KNOWS is armed and willing to kill people!
Even after all of that, however, the resolution of the mystery was so blatantly, incredibly stupid that I am going to complain about it at length.
Of the many suspects, which include Madison's entire theater troupe, her family, and random people she worked with, two of them are:
- Jane, the theater manager, who hated her because Madison abused and humiliated her. She ends up being Charlene's prime suspect and is eventually accused of the murder because she stole an extremely recognizable ring off Madison's finger as Madison lay dying, then painted it silver so no one would recognize it(?) and wore it everywhere for reasons that are never explained (other than "up yours, Madison."). Due to this, she is arrested for the murder, but insists she didn't do it.
- Tyler, Madison's ex-fiance and the ring's rightful owner (it was a family heirloom), who spent the whole book asking everyone he ran into if they had seen the missing ring because he wanted to recover it. He and Jane were in the same location in several scenes, e.g. the wake.
At the end, after Jane had been arrested for murder and was out on bail, Tyler turned up with a gun at Charlene's B&B and, while preparing to kill her, confessed to being the real murderer, and then told her that he and Jane were working together, with Jane providing a distraction for the shooting.
...........wat.
- If Jane knew that Tyler was the murderer, why on earth didn't she just accuse HIM while the police were holding her for murder!!? It's true that she was an accomplice, but she could pretty easily have flipped on him, and "accomplice to homicide" is still an order of magnitude less bad than "person who pulled the trigger." She'd rather go down for a murder she didn't technically commit than turn in this rando who she was only working with because they both hated Madison?
- So the ONE PERSON in the entire book that Tyler never asked "Hey, have you seen this extremely recognizable ring?" was HIS ACCOMPLICE.
- There is no earthly reason why Tyler would try to kill Charlene at this stage, when everyone including Charlene already thinks that Jane did it. All he did was put himself in jeopardy (and, as it turned out, get arrested) and reveal that he was the killer to someone who didn't even consider him a prime suspect.
I also just need to point out that it turns out Tyler shot Madison while dressed as a woman, but as far as I can tell, there's no particular purpose to this other than preventing him from being recognizable in amateur videos of the crowd. And also, we know that he was wandering around earlier dressed as himself, because Charlene ran into him (literally) before the shooting. So apparently, while planning to kill Madison and having already set this up beforehand with Jane, he walked around undisguised, bumped into Charlene and accidentally spilled a latte on her - and then he ran off, changed into a female disguise, came back, shot Madison, and made a run for it.
I feel as if there are a number of elements in this book that look like they ought to be there as red herrings or obfuscation (the fake prop guns, Tyler being a master of disguise who can even fool people who have met him) but actually don't serve that purpose because they're introduced at the same time that the real explanation is given, rather than being seeded in as clues or a distraction earlier.
These were the primary things that I was thinking about during the climax, but the more I reflected on it, the less sense any of it made. There was no explanation how Jane (a mousy theater manager in Salem, MA) and Tyler (a talent agent from LA who can't possibly have been in town for more than a few days) met and decided to trust each other with a shared murder plot. Actually, no character's motivations in this book made any sense whatsoever, such as Madison leaving a lucrative modeling career in LA and moving to Salem to work for community theater as part of some kind of long-game plan to ruin her rival Amy's life after Amy fled LA because of her. But not in an All About Eve kind of way! More of an "I am going to give up my career and move across the country just to be a dick to you" kind of way.
So basically, it appears that the even-numbered books are terrible (but still give pretty good ghost action), and the odd ones are much better. The fifth one opens with a character faking his own death while claiming to be a vampire (OR IS HE REALLY MURDERED) so this is already shaping up to have more of the batshit murder stylings that are what I come to cozy mysteries for.
It occurred to me recently that there were probably more books in the series I haven't read yet, so I picked up the latest ones (#3-5).
As noted in the previous review, the actual murder mysteries aren't really these books' strong points, but #3 was pretty good - in large part because the nature of the murder (a hit and run) wasn't obviously a murder rather than an accident, so there was no particular reason for the police to put a lot of effort into investigating it, or for the heroine to believe she would be in danger for investigating it. Both of which I feel are necessary for a cozy mystery to provide decent suspension of disbelief: the murder has to be ridiculous or obscure or both, and you need a good reason for the amateur sleuth to run around investigating things without looking like a lunatic, such as having a believable reason why it isn't going to be investigated as a murder, or the victim isn't someone who the authorities believe deserves justice, etc.
The Charlene-Jack interactions continue to be absolutely adorable and BY FAR my favorite thing about these books. She films community events on her phone and brings them home to make him feel included since he can't leave the house! They watch ghost documentaries together for "research"! He tucks blankets around her when his ghostly presence chills the room! At one point he shows up in a sweater with snowflakes in his hair and she asks if he's been playing in the snow, and he has, indeed, been playing in the snow. They have an incredibly charged, flirty, fun dynamic with both of them clearly enjoying the heck out of each other's company, and she has 1000% more chemistry with the ghost than she does with her alleged love interest, the local detective, who mostly just scolds her for going near crime scenes.
So the third book was fun, and then I got to the fourth one, which I finished last night, and mainly powered through for the Jack-
I can give you an excellent demonstration of this with the murder scene.
The victim, Madison, is a community theater actress who is spoiled, obnoxious, and universally hated, thus making every person she's ever interacted with a potential suspect, in classic cozy mystery style. She is shot during a Fourth of July reenactment of an American Revolution scene involving fake guns. But she really falls down, and everyone realizes immediately that someone shot her from the crowd.
As well as being in poor taste given real life mass shootings, everyone reacts to this in a way that makes more sense for the actress collapsing from a heart attack than someone in the crowd shooting at her.
No one in this scene panics, hides, or acts like calling the police is a big priority. In fact, the person who calls the police is Charlene, calling her detective friend in a way that's more of a personal "hey, just wanted to let you know", as opposed to a dozen people frantically calling 911. No one acts like they feel like they're in danger. No one, INCLUDING THE POLICE, tries to lock down the area or stop people from wandering in and out. In fact, several of the main suspects immediately disappear on their own errands and no one seems to care. No one seems that upset or traumatized by having just witnessed someone being shot in front of them. The hit and run scene in the previous book was a lot more realistic in terms of the witnesses being genuinely panicked and upset!
I genuinely don't know, and I still don't know, why the author went with this murder method instead of one of 1000 less conspicuous and less triggering murder methods, especially since there's never any question that Madison was shot with a real gun from the crowd and not one of the fake guns, which means there's no purpose to doing it onstage at all. The fake guns don't even fire blanks, so they don't even make noise to cover up a gunshot. And it's literally the most public way that you could possibly murder someone. There's a lampshading later on when the heroine contemplates how there are a bunch of ways to kill someone in a theater and make it look like an accident, but she never goes ahead and theorizes why someone would pick a far riskier and more public method (other than just to muse that the killer must really have wanted people to know Madison was murdered - BUT WHY?!!).
So that didn't get us off to a very good start, and then the heroine proceeds to spend the rest of the book investigating in spite of the police telling her not to, and blithely inserting herself into scenes full of suspects in a similar way to the previous book, except in this case SHE KNOWS there's someone running around with a gun who's already killed once! In a way this is the polar opposite of the previous book, in which there was no particular reason for the police to treat the killing as a priority or even believe it was premeditated, leaving the field wide open for Charlene to investigate with relative impunity. In this case, however, someone was shot at a very public Fourth of July celebration in a community park, and that someone was a young, white, wealthy, well-connected actress, so OF COURSE the police are going to investigate this, and all Charlene is going to do is trip over them right and left in the course of a largely unnecessary personal investigation into someone who, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, she KNOWS is armed and willing to kill people!
Even after all of that, however, the resolution of the mystery was so blatantly, incredibly stupid that I am going to complain about it at length.
Of the many suspects, which include Madison's entire theater troupe, her family, and random people she worked with, two of them are:
- Jane, the theater manager, who hated her because Madison abused and humiliated her. She ends up being Charlene's prime suspect and is eventually accused of the murder because she stole an extremely recognizable ring off Madison's finger as Madison lay dying, then painted it silver so no one would recognize it(?) and wore it everywhere for reasons that are never explained (other than "up yours, Madison."). Due to this, she is arrested for the murder, but insists she didn't do it.
- Tyler, Madison's ex-fiance and the ring's rightful owner (it was a family heirloom), who spent the whole book asking everyone he ran into if they had seen the missing ring because he wanted to recover it. He and Jane were in the same location in several scenes, e.g. the wake.
At the end, after Jane had been arrested for murder and was out on bail, Tyler turned up with a gun at Charlene's B&B and, while preparing to kill her, confessed to being the real murderer, and then told her that he and Jane were working together, with Jane providing a distraction for the shooting.
...........wat.
- If Jane knew that Tyler was the murderer, why on earth didn't she just accuse HIM while the police were holding her for murder!!? It's true that she was an accomplice, but she could pretty easily have flipped on him, and "accomplice to homicide" is still an order of magnitude less bad than "person who pulled the trigger." She'd rather go down for a murder she didn't technically commit than turn in this rando who she was only working with because they both hated Madison?
- So the ONE PERSON in the entire book that Tyler never asked "Hey, have you seen this extremely recognizable ring?" was HIS ACCOMPLICE.
- There is no earthly reason why Tyler would try to kill Charlene at this stage, when everyone including Charlene already thinks that Jane did it. All he did was put himself in jeopardy (and, as it turned out, get arrested) and reveal that he was the killer to someone who didn't even consider him a prime suspect.
I also just need to point out that it turns out Tyler shot Madison while dressed as a woman, but as far as I can tell, there's no particular purpose to this other than preventing him from being recognizable in amateur videos of the crowd. And also, we know that he was wandering around earlier dressed as himself, because Charlene ran into him (literally) before the shooting. So apparently, while planning to kill Madison and having already set this up beforehand with Jane, he walked around undisguised, bumped into Charlene and accidentally spilled a latte on her - and then he ran off, changed into a female disguise, came back, shot Madison, and made a run for it.
I feel as if there are a number of elements in this book that look like they ought to be there as red herrings or obfuscation (the fake prop guns, Tyler being a master of disguise who can even fool people who have met him) but actually don't serve that purpose because they're introduced at the same time that the real explanation is given, rather than being seeded in as clues or a distraction earlier.
These were the primary things that I was thinking about during the climax, but the more I reflected on it, the less sense any of it made. There was no explanation how Jane (a mousy theater manager in Salem, MA) and Tyler (a talent agent from LA who can't possibly have been in town for more than a few days) met and decided to trust each other with a shared murder plot. Actually, no character's motivations in this book made any sense whatsoever, such as Madison leaving a lucrative modeling career in LA and moving to Salem to work for community theater as part of some kind of long-game plan to ruin her rival Amy's life after Amy fled LA because of her. But not in an All About Eve kind of way! More of an "I am going to give up my career and move across the country just to be a dick to you" kind of way.
So basically, it appears that the even-numbered books are terrible (but still give pretty good ghost action), and the odd ones are much better. The fifth one opens with a character faking his own death while claiming to be a vampire (OR IS HE REALLY MURDERED) so this is already shaping up to have more of the batshit murder stylings that are what I come to cozy mysteries for.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
As one does.
I enjoyed this write-up probably more than you enjoyed the book.
I hope book 5 lives up to the batshit murder promise!
no subject
a character faking his own death while claiming to be a vampire
Now THAT is quality content.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
That does indeed sound more promising ^^
While book four sounds, uh... highly questionable.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject