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amlibera's review against another edition
3.0
Charming and light mystery novel set in the private school world.
geisttull's review against another edition
3.0
Good book. I'll read the next one. Liked the characters and their relationships.
lisawhelpley's review against another edition
2.0
I am not a fan of murder mysteries and I'm certainly not a fan of simplistic, mediocre writing. I contemplated quitting the book halfway through but stuck with it. Not sure why I did.
machadofam8's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed this - loved the NYC setting, great characters, especially Rannie and a plot that kept my attention!
gaderianne's review against another edition
2.0
I took me a long time to finish this book. Because I just wanted interested in it. It was boring...until about 3/4 of the way through.
So...why didn't I like the book?
1. Well it wasn't what I expected. I expected some fun chick lit - some light mystery with some romance thrown in. No...not so. Instead I got a pretty heavy read with murder, serial killers, another murder, drugs, and unnecessary self-pleasuring scenes. (Yuck.)
2. The main character was a copy editor. And she kept correcting everyone's grammar throughout it. It got old fast. There is nothing that turns me off more than a snotty know it all. And this made me not like the main character.
3. I could tell who the CHAPS killer was when I first met all of the characters. No big mystery there.
So...why didn't I like the book?
1. Well it wasn't what I expected. I expected some fun chick lit - some light mystery with some romance thrown in. No...not so. Instead I got a pretty heavy read with murder, serial killers, another murder, drugs, and unnecessary self-pleasuring scenes. (Yuck.)
2. The main character was a copy editor. And she kept correcting everyone's grammar throughout it. It got old fast. There is nothing that turns me off more than a snotty know it all. And this made me not like the main character.
3. I could tell who the CHAPS killer was when I first met all of the characters. No big mystery there.
hugbandit7's review against another edition
4.0
I read an advance copy of this book last year. It was pretty good!
janeycanuck's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Nothing groundbreaking but made for good vacation reading.
spilled's review against another edition
2.0
Hmm. Despite the hot pink on the cover and the fluffy blurb, something about this book made me think it still might be good when I picked it up, but now I have no idea what that something was. I read the beginning, then I was bored, so I read the ending, and I was still bored, but I thought it would make sense if I read the middle, so I skimmed the whole middle only to find out, nope, I was still bored. Maybe there were witty things in there or something but I just wasn't feeling it. Good thing I read fast.
plantbirdwoman's review against another edition
1.0
When I read recently that there was a mystery series featuring a copy editor as the sleuth, I was intrigued. Having been married to a copy editor for many years with a chance to observe his powers of deduction up close and personal, it occurred to me that a word sleuth might make a very good detective. So, of course I had to read it, and since I am an obsessive kind of reader who likes to read series books in order, I started with the first one, Dangerous Admissions.
While the concept seemed a good one, the execution was amateurish and, frankly, had little to recommend it. I struggled through it to the bitter end, but only because I like to finish what I start.
The protagonist is a divorced single mother living in New York. She was formerly employed by one of the big publishing houses, until she made an egregious mistake on the reissuing of a Nancy Drew mystery, The Secret of the Old Clock. She failed to notice that the "l" was left out of "clock." Seems an incredibly stupid mistake for an experienced copy editor to make. Maybe she deserved to be fired.
Now she spends her time free lancing and working part time at the posh high school that her teenage son attends. She also has an older daughter who is in college. They all live very privileged lives with no visible means of support.
The director of college admissions at the posh school is an elderly man and one morning he is found dead at his desk at the school. At first it is assumed to be natural causes. He was known to be ill. But an autopsy proves it was actually murder. Poison. Who had a motive and opportunity to kill him?
Not long after, an English teacher at the school, one who had been close to the first murder victim, is shoved off a balcony to her death. The plot thickens. Well, not by much. This is pretty thin gruel.
I didn't like any of these characters. Indeed, the most fortunate characters in the book were the two murder victims who were soon out of it. Everyone in the book seemed like a cardboard cutout or maybe reality show participants. They just never seemed like real people.
The writer throws in a few sex scenes in an apparent attempt to liven things up a bit, but those scenes, too, seem stilted and not very interesting.
I still think the idea of a copy editing detective might work, but it needs a much more interesting copy editor and a writer who is able to construct and execute a plausible plot.
While the concept seemed a good one, the execution was amateurish and, frankly, had little to recommend it. I struggled through it to the bitter end, but only because I like to finish what I start.
The protagonist is a divorced single mother living in New York. She was formerly employed by one of the big publishing houses, until she made an egregious mistake on the reissuing of a Nancy Drew mystery, The Secret of the Old Clock. She failed to notice that the "l" was left out of "clock." Seems an incredibly stupid mistake for an experienced copy editor to make. Maybe she deserved to be fired.
Now she spends her time free lancing and working part time at the posh high school that her teenage son attends. She also has an older daughter who is in college. They all live very privileged lives with no visible means of support.
The director of college admissions at the posh school is an elderly man and one morning he is found dead at his desk at the school. At first it is assumed to be natural causes. He was known to be ill. But an autopsy proves it was actually murder. Poison. Who had a motive and opportunity to kill him?
Not long after, an English teacher at the school, one who had been close to the first murder victim, is shoved off a balcony to her death. The plot thickens. Well, not by much. This is pretty thin gruel.
I didn't like any of these characters. Indeed, the most fortunate characters in the book were the two murder victims who were soon out of it. Everyone in the book seemed like a cardboard cutout or maybe reality show participants. They just never seemed like real people.
The writer throws in a few sex scenes in an apparent attempt to liven things up a bit, but those scenes, too, seem stilted and not very interesting.
I still think the idea of a copy editing detective might work, but it needs a much more interesting copy editor and a writer who is able to construct and execute a plausible plot.
gglazer's review against another edition
3.0
Read this for an LJ column on books about college admissions (suggestions eagerly accepted if you can think of any!). It's a totally light-hearted "suspense-romance," neither of which are my usual genres, but O'Connor won my heart by creating a copy editor protagonist who thinks and acts exactly like a real copy editor, complete with complaints about who/whom and the misuse of commas. It's like she read the inside of my brain (and the mystery was fairly compelling, too).