Strangled Prose by Joan E. Hess

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


If you don't mind a verbose author (in my opinion she could\should have cut at least 50 pages of snark, innuendo and sarcasm) then this seems to be the author for you.

If you like the Arly Hanks series don't expect this one to be similar. It is so far into a different realm as to be nearly unrecognizable as the same author. Perhaps that was Ms Hess's intention. Perhaps she thought that she should write something 'highbrow' to offense the fun that is Arly Hanks.

The plot had holes big enough that you could drive a truck through some of them, the characters were not fleshed out very well (although perhaps they flesh out better later in the series), the back story comes at very odd times. Such as the author talks about Ms Malloy's late husband at a time in the book that left me wondering if I had missed a book and that this one wasn't the first in the series. Claire's daughter is obnoxious (not all 14 year old girls are obnoxious) in a very trite way.

The relationship that is most likely going to develop (actually by reading the synopsis of some of the later books I know it does) is with the cop that is investigating the murder and Claire specifically. And maybe I'm not a cop, but boy, unless things really are that different in small college towns in the South this "investigating" was far from realistic. Yes I know that this is fiction so an author can pretty much write about things in whatever manner they want---but it sure help the authors credibility to stay within the realm of realism.

Perhaps the series gets better as it goes along and maybe the snark and sarcasm will grow on you -I'm not going to give it a chance.

Beside I really dislike authors that put down people who like certain book genres that the author doesn't produce -- it sort of reminds me of a child who makes fun of another child because the second one can do something well that the first child can't.



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