Tuesday, September 16, 2008

REVIEW: Mum's the Word


Title: Mum's the Word
Author: Kate Collins
ISBN: 0451213505/Signet
Protagonist: Abby Knight, owner of Bloomers, a flower shop
Setting: present-day; New Chapel, a small northwest Indiana college town
Series: #1 Flower Shop Mysteries
Rating: DNF

First Line: Most people hate Mondays.

Abby Knight, daughter of an ex-cop and a social-climbing mother, has flunked out of law school and invested the rest of her savings in a flower shop called Bloomers in her hometown in northwestern Indiana. Bright one Monday morning, she travels to work in her beloved 1960 banana yellow Corvette and parks it within view of Bloomers. Seconds later, a man runs out of an alley, jumps into his SUV, fires it up and rams right into the front end of Abby's 'vette. Shortly after that, she learns that a young man was murdered in an apartment down the same alley the man came running out. "I saw the murderer!" Abby shouts. (Hey, it can happen. My mother saw bank robbers changing cars in a parking lot across the street from the feed store where she was working once.) Abby goes to the police and is less than satisfied with their response. This being one of those cozy mysteries, you know that she's not going to be able to keep out of the investigation.

I thought I was in the mood for a cozy. Evidently it wasn't this one. By page 69 when I learned where the murder victim worked, I had it all figured out. Since none of the characters were grabbing me at the time, I flipped to the end of the book to see if my powers of deduction were still intact. They are. Abby may be right down someone else's alley, but she wasn't in mine.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to make a comment. I really appreciate it!