All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon

All Dressed Up by Jilly Gagnon

by Carol1 Comment
If you read the blurb above, you know why I picked up All Dressed Up. It's set around a 1920s theme murder mystery weekend at a wonderfully atmospheric hotel. So there's the fake murder to solve, that of songstress Ida Crooner, but then one of the staff doesn't show up for work. Becca is worried something may have happened to the young woman, but no one else seems concerned. It should have been fabulous. Each of the guests is given a character to play along with a dossier of information and instructions. We have clues for the weekend and clues to the real crime. It's complicated but in a way that could have been fun. Instead, we spend way too much time reading about Becca and Blake's marriage trouble. And the other guests' marriages for that matter. I'm here for the mystery, not the side drama. And quite honestly, I was a little mad at the author for making me annoyed...
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Curious Minds by Janet Evanovich and Phoef Sutton

by Carol3 Comments
Janet Evanovich can be hit and miss for me. I'm not sure which category Curious Minds falls into. I like Knight and Moon. He is over the top eccentric, but cute and funny. Moon follows the rules, usually, but ends of having to go along with Knight. They are a good couple, and the dialogue at times is laugh-out-loud funny, but I'm not quite buying the sparks yet. I think for the pair of them, this was a good first novel. I think I'll enjoy them in later books, as long as the plot is a bit better. The whole conspiracy in this one was just over the top. Brothers working together to steal money from the Federal Reserve and more or less control all the world's economy, I think. The conspiracy reaches into the NSA and the Supreme Court. Maybe something like that could happen, but it stretched believability for me. It's just too big for the wacko and side kick to deal with...
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