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A review by toastlover1
The Dead Cat Bounce by Sarah Graves
1.0
Without merit
This will probably be my last "cozy mystery," so I will indulge myself with a lengthy diatribe on the topic.
I grew up with Agatha Christie and Lilian Jackson Braun, so I thought the cozy mystery genre would be a great fit. Unfortunately, this book, and similar series that I've tried, uses a lazy "write by numbers" formula that leads to material that is not just unremarkable, but substandard. In the books written to fit this niche, the heroine is a mature woman who is still attractive, and is restarting her life again after a divorce and/or career change and/or relocating. She is well liked, and an observer of both human nature and of some quaint and picturesque place. She has in her new life, or meets, some idealized version of a hyper-masculine man who is everything she found lacking in her past relationship. He is the strong, yet sensitive man that every movie from the first half of the 20th century has assured us should be every woman's fantasy. The protagonist also needs a loveable pet, and a vocation that is the theme of a basic cable channel i.e. cooking, home-repair, animals ect. Her town needs to be populated with a series of two-dimensional, forgettable, and generally oblivious characters that could be lifted directly from any 80's television crime-drama that needed its audience to know if someone was a good guy or bad guy within the first 5 minutes of an episode. The townspeople are also required to know the complete history of every person in town, know everything that happens in the town within an hour, and be willing to share this information at any given moment.
All of these standard 'fill in the blank' elements wouldn't mean that the book had to be bad, but the real problem is in the execution. The writer seems to operate under the assumption that if they provide the basic format, they don't need to worry about writing well. Thus, we end up with the literary equivalent to romance novels, but without the titillating features that at least make romance novels appealing to some. Graves did try slightly in that vein with this laughable line: I wanted to drape myself on him as if I were ivy and he were a trellis.
I almost stopped reading this particular "cozy mystery" immediately when the writer went on some awkward tangent extolling the virtues of guns in small towns and then trying to sell their use as a therapeutic activity , but I found the liberal use of SAT words and the detailed financial world insights slightly intriguing. After a while, I became curious which of the never-ending parade of Cabot Cove style characters that were impossible to keep track of was actually the perpetrator since the main suspect that the protagonist was so persistently and single-mindedly focused on (to the point of obsession) got so much attention that there was no way it could have been her. In the end, it wasn't worth the wait, and the only real pleasure I derived from the book was being able to write my review knowing I finished the entire thing.
This will probably be my last "cozy mystery," so I will indulge myself with a lengthy diatribe on the topic.
I grew up with Agatha Christie and Lilian Jackson Braun, so I thought the cozy mystery genre would be a great fit. Unfortunately, this book, and similar series that I've tried, uses a lazy "write by numbers" formula that leads to material that is not just unremarkable, but substandard. In the books written to fit this niche, the heroine is a mature woman who is still attractive, and is restarting her life again after a divorce and/or career change and/or relocating. She is well liked, and an observer of both human nature and of some quaint and picturesque place. She has in her new life, or meets, some idealized version of a hyper-masculine man who is everything she found lacking in her past relationship. He is the strong, yet sensitive man that every movie from the first half of the 20th century has assured us should be every woman's fantasy. The protagonist also needs a loveable pet, and a vocation that is the theme of a basic cable channel i.e. cooking, home-repair, animals ect. Her town needs to be populated with a series of two-dimensional, forgettable, and generally oblivious characters that could be lifted directly from any 80's television crime-drama that needed its audience to know if someone was a good guy or bad guy within the first 5 minutes of an episode. The townspeople are also required to know the complete history of every person in town, know everything that happens in the town within an hour, and be willing to share this information at any given moment.
All of these standard 'fill in the blank' elements wouldn't mean that the book had to be bad, but the real problem is in the execution. The writer seems to operate under the assumption that if they provide the basic format, they don't need to worry about writing well. Thus, we end up with the literary equivalent to romance novels, but without the titillating features that at least make romance novels appealing to some. Graves did try slightly in that vein with this laughable line: I wanted to drape myself on him as if I were ivy and he were a trellis.
I almost stopped reading this particular "cozy mystery" immediately when the writer went on some awkward tangent extolling the virtues of guns in small towns and then trying to sell their use as a therapeutic activity , but I found the liberal use of SAT words and the detailed financial world insights slightly intriguing. After a while, I became curious which of the never-ending parade of Cabot Cove style characters that were impossible to keep track of was actually the perpetrator since the main suspect that the protagonist was so persistently and single-mindedly focused on (to the point of obsession) got so much attention that there was no way it could have been her. In the end, it wasn't worth the wait, and the only real pleasure I derived from the book was being able to write my review knowing I finished the entire thing.