Laura Childs - Death by Darjeeling
I put this book on my reading list in the hopes of discovering another good example of the newly-popular "cozy" mysteries.
The premise is that Theodosia Browning is a woman, I'm guessing in her thirties, who gave up a successful advertising career to run a tea shop in historic Charleston, South Carolina. She works with a professional tea man Drayton Conneley and her waitress and woman-of-all-work Hayley Parker, and now Hayley's recently widowed friend Bethany. The tea shop team serve tea and cakes at the end of a nighttime tour of Charleston's historic homes, and they are horrified when a real estate developer Hughes Barron is found dead after drinking the tea. Theodosia begins poking around in the mystery, partly from curiosity and partly to make sure her business doesn't suffer from unfounded accusations.
There were two good points about this book. The first was the information on tea and its associated businesses. The second was the description of the historic district of Charleston.
Sadly, that was all that was good. The author takes what could be a very interesting scenario and completely ruins it, in my opinion, with low quality characterization and writing. The characters are all complete cardboard cutouts. The author tells, rather than shows, that Theodosia is attractive and smart and wonderful. We glean this information from strange switches in point-of-view, from third person Theo to third person anyone-who-sees-Theo. The entire purpose of these jarring changes is to get everyone else's fawning descriptions of Theo herself.
This example, from the middle of a chapter, is a representative example. Tanner Joseph glanced up from his iMac computer and the new climate modeling program he was trying to teach himself and gazed at the woman who'd just stepped through his door. Lovely, was his first impression. Perhaps a few years older than he was, but really lovely. Great hair plus a real presence about her. Was she old money, perhaps?
The heroine herself has a particularly irritating habit. Once Theo has discovered that the victim was poisoned, she jumps to conclusions about everyone who has ever learned anything about any poison. For example, the young man she hires to create labels for tea tins spent time in the Amazon, where he very suspiciously learned about poison dart frogs. This leads Theo to put him on her list of suspects, never mind her complete lack of evidence of any kind and the relative improbability of the murder method.
I finally gave up reading and just skipped to the end, to see which of Theo's numerous suspects actually did the murder. It was no one she had suspected, revealing that almost the entire book was spent detailing red herrings. That made me glad I hadn't bothered with the last third of them.
Summary: Good premise, poor execution. I'm certainly glad I didn't buy this one, and I probably won't read the next in the series, unless I hear that the writing improves.
The premise is that Theodosia Browning is a woman, I'm guessing in her thirties, who gave up a successful advertising career to run a tea shop in historic Charleston, South Carolina. She works with a professional tea man Drayton Conneley and her waitress and woman-of-all-work Hayley Parker, and now Hayley's recently widowed friend Bethany. The tea shop team serve tea and cakes at the end of a nighttime tour of Charleston's historic homes, and they are horrified when a real estate developer Hughes Barron is found dead after drinking the tea. Theodosia begins poking around in the mystery, partly from curiosity and partly to make sure her business doesn't suffer from unfounded accusations.
There were two good points about this book. The first was the information on tea and its associated businesses. The second was the description of the historic district of Charleston.
Sadly, that was all that was good. The author takes what could be a very interesting scenario and completely ruins it, in my opinion, with low quality characterization and writing. The characters are all complete cardboard cutouts. The author tells, rather than shows, that Theodosia is attractive and smart and wonderful. We glean this information from strange switches in point-of-view, from third person Theo to third person anyone-who-sees-Theo. The entire purpose of these jarring changes is to get everyone else's fawning descriptions of Theo herself.
This example, from the middle of a chapter, is a representative example. Tanner Joseph glanced up from his iMac computer and the new climate modeling program he was trying to teach himself and gazed at the woman who'd just stepped through his door. Lovely, was his first impression. Perhaps a few years older than he was, but really lovely. Great hair plus a real presence about her. Was she old money, perhaps?
The heroine herself has a particularly irritating habit. Once Theo has discovered that the victim was poisoned, she jumps to conclusions about everyone who has ever learned anything about any poison. For example, the young man she hires to create labels for tea tins spent time in the Amazon, where he very suspiciously learned about poison dart frogs. This leads Theo to put him on her list of suspects, never mind her complete lack of evidence of any kind and the relative improbability of the murder method.
I finally gave up reading and just skipped to the end, to see which of Theo's numerous suspects actually did the murder. It was no one she had suspected, revealing that almost the entire book was spent detailing red herrings. That made me glad I hadn't bothered with the last third of them.
Summary: Good premise, poor execution. I'm certainly glad I didn't buy this one, and I probably won't read the next in the series, unless I hear that the writing improves.