Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsthis entry was disappointing
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 1, 2023
Too saddled with "TDTL", too dumb to live, a condition that too often effects cozy mystery characters...
I don't expect fiction to be "real" but when too many "Oh, really... " behaviors and conditions are used to result in action or extending the mystery, it reduced enjoyment in the story and/or respect or interest in the characters.
We are supposed to expect the police won't let them remove a facebook video that might be inciting attacks on specific individuals?
An associate and good friend leaves her boss/friend walking a wild mustang home, alone in the woods she is unfamiliar with in winter when three people may have been murdered in response to a video involving her boss/friend?
and, Katie is ready to move to the next stage with the boyfriend who just made another woman move out of his home when she is exposed in an affair with another man after Katie took the narcissistic old boyfriend into her home to convalesce and allowed him to take advantage?
Too many characters I have liked in previous books behaved foolishly or weakly...
there were the usual great characters, informative situations involving animals (we looked into sheltering mustangs some years ago, I loved the interactions with Lobo, but, again, she walks the poor animal some distance favoring on foot until she reaches the highway and THEN she looks at his hoof and removes a stone? sheeeesh..... her "emergency kit" doesn't include a hoof pick?)
There is an effective depiction of customers who abuse a service provider for entertainment or profit, "I'll go online/to the neighborhood and say nasty things about you (if you make me pay the fees we agreed on)" Happens more than ever. And sadly too often in our current culture, these who should should support don't have as loud a voice as abusers. Sadly, Katie and her staff don't model effective ways of dealing with the confrontations, needed to keep the abuse coming to keep the story going... but I hope it will enlighten readers to question the bullying used to destroy good business, often personal vendetta or to remove competition and lessen the value of exposing poor business practice.
