The Sweet Taste of Murder (James)

The Sweet Taste of Murder: An Angel Lake Mystery - CeeCee James

"Somehow, in a fit of jealousy, did he poison Cameron, strapped him in the driver’s side of his car and parked it across the tracks?"

 

"The recently divorced socialite treated Lavina with the social acquaintance of a rival mob wife" [social acquaintance?]

 

If language murder of the sort shown above doesn't bother you, you'll probably enjoy this book. For me, there's a reason it was put in my "Free Modern Kindle Rubbish" folder. The dangling modifiers, diction errors, and far-too-frequent sentence fragments nearly drove me to a DNF within the first few chapters. The mystery itself is not bad and quite well spun out, which is why the book got its second star. The tone is breezy and the dialogue arch and silly, which fits the main characters fine.

 

I sure hope this author got a kickback from Fitbit, because I have never seen a commercial brand name so blatantly insisted upon, chapter after chapter. The main character is embarking on a fitness regime as a characterization point (she's recovering from a nasty divorce), but even where she's not running, she's constantly checking the time on the thing, or rubbing her fingers under it, or some such thing. In fact, I wonder if this is genuinely an instance of product placement. If so, ick. If not, the author needs to find some synonyms and a few other means of characterization.

 

This incipient series gets a "don't bother" from me.