A review by hgranger
Booked for Murder by R.J. Blain

1.0

I tried really hard to finish this and finally gave up. It seems like such a promising premise — vigilante librarians, a protagonist who has become disabled and has to deal with the changes in her life stemming from that, and a mystery to solve. Yet this book took all these excellent ingredients and somehow mixed them into the dullest book stew I’ve encountered in a long time. It was slow moving, mostly because of the absurd amount of repetitions. And not just small things like “he was a very tall man” or “the cat was cute” like some other books manage to drill into their readers heads. This book has conversations and descriptions repeated verbatim within the same chapter. I’m impressed with anyone who could get through that. I couldn’t.

The final nail in the coffin for me was when I was supposed to believe that a reasonably intelligent, magically powerful woman, who has worked as a bodyguard for the same man for years, thinks that growing her hair out and wearing glasses is a disguise that this man who spent most of his waking hours with her wouldn’t see through. (Which he does, of course, but the idea that she’d even think that is just silly.)