Last night I stayed up really late, and thought I had gotten caught up. Then this morning I realized that I had lent something I had read to a coworker, so should type that one up, too, even though it sucked. Oh well. I would have probably had trouble getting to sleep last night anyway, after the Tigers relief pitchers blew a key game to Cleveland...
Puss 'n Cahoots by Rita Mae Brown is one of her Mrs. Murphy Mysteries. The previous two (maybe even three) books in this old favorite series have been really bad. I was getting ready to give up on this series, and this is the book that pushed me over the edge.
Why?
I think that the author's heart just isn't in it anymore. She has changed the personalities of the characters. The main character is a woman who has always prided herself on her independence. Suddenly she quits her job over something ridiculously stupid (she cannot take her pets to work with her anymore - I mean, give me a break - how many people would be allowed to take their pets to work with them in the first place?). So she quit her job for sheer stupidity, and immediately hooks up with her ex husband, whom she broke up with because he was cheating on her with a friend. And of course, now that she needs to be supported, she goes around telling everyone that the ex was male and did what came naturally to men (huh?????) and that she had been immature to react like that to his adultery. Let me puke now.
But it gets even worse. The friend the ex cheated with is a middle aged woman and widow, and is something of a town bicycle. All of the men got a ride. And then she suddenly realizes that she is a lesbian. Give me a freakin' break. She had no clue for forty years of life that she was attracted to other women? Not even as a horny teenager? This is not a highly religious woman who stayed in the closet so deeply that not even she had a clue. This is the most sexually active and adventurous character in the series. Spare me.
And the books themselves became stale. Rather than having cool little mysteries in a charming little small town in Virginia, they became...just plain bad. They did not build on each other anymore. In one book, suddenly everyone in town had season tickets to the local university's women's basketball team and everyone was a basketball fanatic. This was made to look as if it has been the case all along - but no one had ever cared in the slightest about basketball (women's or men's) previously. And do not even get me started on every character in the book suddenly plowing up prime farm land on their horse farms to plant wine grapes.
Since the setting was a small town in Virginia, within the first few books you knew that all of the crime victims and criminals were all from the new characters...so why bother getting attached to any of them?
And the preaching. The last few books have been filled with the author preaching about politics and current affairs and controversies.
God, I hate preachy writers.
So what made this particular book so bad that I am giving up on the series, even though the last few have been bad?
It was the honeymoon for the main character and the husband she has just remarried.
They bring along the pets.
They seem more like brother and sister than newlyweds. Why did these two even get married again, other than the woman needing to be supported after her own stupidity about her former job?
They go to a big horse show in Kentucky, and the book is filled with a bunch of horse trainers who have so little development as characters that you have to go back to the character list to even attempt to keep them straight.
These are supposed to be animal lovers, yet they take their two cats and dog to another state (on their honeymoon!!!) and then let them roam freely around the horse show grounds, with all sorts of strangers and high strung horses milling around.
There is no attempt to solve the mystery. At all.
Tons of more preaching from the author, on everything from drug usage in sports to illegal immigration.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
Just plain bad book - and the third (or fourth, I might have blocked some badness there) in a row in this series. Time to move on...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment