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