Sunday, September 7, 2014

Murder is a Family Business - A Review

Murder 

Recently this was available on sale or for free so I got it and read it. I know Amazon is a bit like the Empire these days, but you can sign up for both BookBub and for Amazon's newsletters to be let known about deals. The other thing to do is just occasionally Google free Kindle books.

Anyway, sometimes the free/cheap deals work out .... and sometimes they don't. This time, it worked out okay. The main character is from a family of private investigators from Palo Alto that works on corporate espionage in Silicon Valley, mostly. Until the main character, Lee Alvarez, stumbles over a dead body. It's a pretty good set up and a pretty good story. It was entertaining, and despite what the cover looks like, she's not always running around in short skirts and losing her high heels. She is from a well-to-do family (half Mexican and half WASP), so you do get good clothing descriptions and cool technology. She's gotta computer geek brother. She's nosy and can't keep anything alone. She's intelligent and knows her job. She knows a lot of investigation is leg work. It's nice to have a blend of Bay Area socialite and immigrant-makes-good in the main character's background.

On the other hand, there were some hiccups. I had a hard time getting past the first chapter. Took me a few tries. I liked it enough to want to keep trying, but for some reason, I kept stumbling over the sentences and descriptions. They didn't flow and it was confusing and it took a couple of tries to get past that.

After that, it was fine, mostly. There were a couple of continuity issues (January in the Bay Area sunset time was one issue that threw me off during a particular scene). And a few other moments where I felt pulled out of the story because of inconsistency or something that felt off. But I mostly like it. I would give it a solid 3.5 out of 5, especially if it's on special or free.

1 comment:

Charles Gramlich said...

Good title. I'm not a big mystery reader.