Rick Bleiweiss – Carol's Notebook

Author: Rick Bleiweiss

Rick’s unique career and life included being a touring/recording musician, recorded songwriter, music producer (including a Grammy nominated album), record company senior executive, running video and recording studios, a convention speaker, lecturer at multiple universities, co-founder of a sports & entertainment marketing program at Baruch College, award-winning author, columnist, journalist, political writer, publishing executive, owner of mail order companies, social activist, and a humanitarian.

I expected to thoroughly enjoy Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives. It features a chief police inspector but is at heart a cozy mystery set in a small town in England in 1910. Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me. Scorbion, is a dapper, overly observant detective, à la Poirot. He is a little more aware of other people's feelings and actually has a love interest, but he didn't stand out for me. There are a lot of characters, the folks at the barbershop, the local bookseller, the townspeople involved in the cases. There were too many for any to have more than one or two defining characteristics - this one's short, this one is from France, this one is "modern." I didn't really care about any of them. The mysteries were okay. They're solved through interrogations at the barbershop, with a few behind-the-scenes phone calls from the police station. The flow wasn't great, but there were a couple of interesting twists....