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tarana's review against another edition
3.0
The wit was good. The mystery good. The character interaction? Dull. Good beach read, but I would not have continued the series if this were my first book.
ncrabb's review against another edition
3.0
So, if you’re a person who must start at the beginning of a mystery series, you’ll probably want to skip this review until you get to it in the series. It’s early on in the series, but it’s not the first book.
What absolutely captivated me about this book is its ability to forcefully pull you into it and keep you there.
Amanda Pepper is a high-school English teacher in Philadelphia. She’s 30, unmarried with a cop boyfriend, well liked by her colleagues, and mostly tolerated by her students. Why do so many of these female sleuths have to have a cop boyfriend? Seriously, folks, why can’t these women date spindly-legged metrosexuals or a John Candie look-alike? It’s always a cop, and that gets me a little tired.
The book opens as Amanda is engaged in a surprising dialogue with a student who expresses her outrage over Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Seizing the moment, as a good teacher will, Amanda suggests that the girl expend some of her frustration on an upcoming term paper about the evils of relationship abuse.
A few scant pages later, we see Amanda sorting books for the school’s annual “This Is Not a Garage Sale.” She stumbles into a book written as a self-help guide for women who have been abused, and she finds notes in the margins from a recent reader. These notes will chill you to the bone. They are cries for help as if the abused reader were screaming in crisp well-defined stereo. The writing style of this author ensures that these notes in the margins and the underlined passages are more than mere words you’ll yawn your way through. You, like Amanda, will become captivated and obsesses with finding the donor and trying to get help to her before it’s too late.
Amanda’s search for the donor takes her to the house of her friend and to the house of her sister—neither of whom suffer at the hands of anyone in their lives, but both of whom Amanda questions and examines closely in a new way brought on by the cry for help penciled in that book.
There’s a great subplot here about a commercial tutorial service for which Amanda wants to work as a way of bringing down a few extra bucks. A colleague at school warns her against working there, but her need for the extra bucks enables her to ignore his warnings for the most part. Those two plots come together rather energetically when Amanda finds the owner of the tutorial service dead on his kitchen floor with his battered bruised wife elsewhere in the house.
Be careful about leaping to conclusions about who did this. You may well figure it out early; I didn’t, but it all made sense at the end.
There’s very little bad language in this book, and I don’t recall any sex scenes. You get the understanding that Amanda and the boyfriend are intimate, but there are no tiresome descriptions of things you can just as easily figure out. This author’s talents are expressed in her ability to show you things rather than tell you. The chilling words scrawled in that book lend a sense of urgency and vividness to the search first for the abused woman and finally for the killer of her husband.
The book ranges over to the man-hater side a bit more than I’d like in spots. Yeah, that’s understandable, but I could have done without some of that. But there is no shortage of humor here. Amanda’s mom, worried that she has a 30-year-old daughter who isn’t married, sends her a primer on how to meet men. The cop boyfriend is also dealing with an ex-girlfriend who has resurfaced after a divorce, and the author’s characterization of the ex-girlfriend will bring a smile here and there.
What absolutely captivated me about this book is its ability to forcefully pull you into it and keep you there.
Amanda Pepper is a high-school English teacher in Philadelphia. She’s 30, unmarried with a cop boyfriend, well liked by her colleagues, and mostly tolerated by her students. Why do so many of these female sleuths have to have a cop boyfriend? Seriously, folks, why can’t these women date spindly-legged metrosexuals or a John Candie look-alike? It’s always a cop, and that gets me a little tired.
The book opens as Amanda is engaged in a surprising dialogue with a student who expresses her outrage over Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Seizing the moment, as a good teacher will, Amanda suggests that the girl expend some of her frustration on an upcoming term paper about the evils of relationship abuse.
A few scant pages later, we see Amanda sorting books for the school’s annual “This Is Not a Garage Sale.” She stumbles into a book written as a self-help guide for women who have been abused, and she finds notes in the margins from a recent reader. These notes will chill you to the bone. They are cries for help as if the abused reader were screaming in crisp well-defined stereo. The writing style of this author ensures that these notes in the margins and the underlined passages are more than mere words you’ll yawn your way through. You, like Amanda, will become captivated and obsesses with finding the donor and trying to get help to her before it’s too late.
Amanda’s search for the donor takes her to the house of her friend and to the house of her sister—neither of whom suffer at the hands of anyone in their lives, but both of whom Amanda questions and examines closely in a new way brought on by the cry for help penciled in that book.
There’s a great subplot here about a commercial tutorial service for which Amanda wants to work as a way of bringing down a few extra bucks. A colleague at school warns her against working there, but her need for the extra bucks enables her to ignore his warnings for the most part. Those two plots come together rather energetically when Amanda finds the owner of the tutorial service dead on his kitchen floor with his battered bruised wife elsewhere in the house.
Be careful about leaping to conclusions about who did this. You may well figure it out early; I didn’t, but it all made sense at the end.
There’s very little bad language in this book, and I don’t recall any sex scenes. You get the understanding that Amanda and the boyfriend are intimate, but there are no tiresome descriptions of things you can just as easily figure out. This author’s talents are expressed in her ability to show you things rather than tell you. The chilling words scrawled in that book lend a sense of urgency and vividness to the search first for the abused woman and finally for the killer of her husband.
The book ranges over to the man-hater side a bit more than I’d like in spots. Yeah, that’s understandable, but I could have done without some of that. But there is no shortage of humor here. Amanda’s mom, worried that she has a 30-year-old daughter who isn’t married, sends her a primer on how to meet men. The cop boyfriend is also dealing with an ex-girlfriend who has resurfaced after a divorce, and the author’s characterization of the ex-girlfriend will bring a smile here and there.
julieputty's review
3.0
Not one of the good books in the series. I'd mark it a 2-star for the series, but 3 stars compared to run of the mill mysteries.
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