Fashion Victim – GT Herren

This is a new series and a spin off from the Chanse MacLeod detective books.  Paige isn’t your normal cozy mystery heroine; she drinks, gets lairy, swears like a trooper and is ready to kick some ass which was refreshing.  I like a character who can drop the f-bomb without wanting to star it out.  The only element that I wasn’t too keen on the fact that she likes to smoke pot, commenting on how it helped her with her creative process and writing her articles.  Maybe I am too conservative, but it didn’t really add anything to her as a character 😦

Paige is working for the Crescent City Magazine in New Orleans and is suffering from a stonking hangover after a particularly boring fashion event.  Unfortunately the person who she was supposed to interview, Marigny Mercereau, had been killed and now instead of conducting a fluffy interview, she has to find another angle for her story and can’t resist investigating.

It turns out that Marigny was short of cash and decided to write her memoirs and blackmail those who might not want to see their antics in print.  So, Paige sets out to interview members of the New Orleans fashion scene to dig up some secrets.  However the main clues to the murder came from a copy of Marigny’s book which she had emailed to Paige before her death.  The culmination of the mystery happened within a couple of pages; annoyingly there weren’t that many candidates for the murderer so it was fairly obvious who the perpetrators were.

As this is a spin off book from the Chanse MacLeod series, I did wonder if I was missing some of the elements by coming to this book cold.  We were introduced to a handful of her friends, most of whom seem to be from the previous series, as well as a long running plot about Paige’s past which will be interesting to find out more about.

This book was a pleasant read and I think that I’ll add the first Chanse MacLeod book to my ‘to-read’ list too.

I was sent this book as part of the CLP Blog tour

All Together Dead – Charlaine Harris

It has only taken seven books, but this one actually had some potential.  Of course there were still plot discrepancies, character inconsistencies, dodgy grammar and so on, but it was OK.

The main news from Bon Temps is that Jason and Crystal got married in a ceremony where Sookie promised to stand in for him if he screws up (or screws around) and you know that it won’t be long before she has to pay the price for his stupidity.

Sookie is finally off to the Rhodes summit and is working for the Queen of Louisiana whose territory has been decimated thanks to Hurricane Katrina.  Her position is also weakened because the Arkansas vampires believe that she had murdered her husband and she so hasn’t inherited his wealth yet.  So times are tough and it gets worse when the Arkansas contingent at the summit are being killed off with Sophie Anne being framed for the murderer.  Naturally, Sookie decides to poke around.  With the subtlety of a sledge hammer, Harris continually references unclaimed luggage being left in the suites, and as someone who remembers the 70’s and 80’s bomb threats in the UK, it was obvious that there was an imminent bomb attack.  Sookie is able to use her talents to help rescue survivors of the blast, hinting at what she could do if she went public with their talents.

Sookie finally realises that she has to decide who she is going to ally herself with, as both the supernatural and human communities want to utilise her talents.  Her love life ends up in the toilet as she is pushing Quinn away, while creating a blood link with Eric.

Having so many characters, and multiple plot lines showed the potential of the book, but in her usual fashion, Harris continued to underestimate the reader and cut corners leaving me feeling short changed at the end of the book.